In 1980 he won a Jane Eliza Procter Fellowship to Princeton University where he studied theoretical condensed matter physics[4] with Philip Warren Anderson.
Contemporaries in the Princeton graduate physics program included Gabriel Kotliar, Cumrun Vafa, Nathan Mhyrvold and Jennifer Chayes.
The slave boson approach has since been widely applied to strongly correlated electron systems, and has proven useful in developing the resonating valence bond theory (RVB) of high temperature superconductivity[9][10] and the understanding of heavy fermion compounds.
[13] Conventional wisdom maintained that because of the Mermin–Wagner theorem, two dimensional Heisenberg magnets are unable to develop any form of long-range order.
Chandra, Coleman and Larkin demonstrated that frustration can lead to a finite temperature Ising phase transition into a striped state with long range spin-nematic order.
[14] Working with Alexei Tsvelik, Coleman carried out some of the earliest applications of Majorana Fermions to condensed matter problems.
to the Kondo lattice, showing that if local moments fractionalize as Majorana, rather than Dirac fermions, the resulting ground-state is an odd-frequency superconductor.
[15][16] Working with Andrew Schofield and Alexei Tsvelik, they later advanced a model to account for the unusual magneto-resistance properties of high temperature superconductors in their normal state, in which the electrons fractionalize into Majorana fermions.
[23][24] Notable former research students and postdoctoral fellows in his group include Ian Ritchey,[25] Eduardo Miranda,[26] Andrew Schofield, Maxim Dzero,[27] Andriy Nevidomskyy[28] and Rebecca Flint[29] Piers Coleman is married to the American theoretical physicist Premala Chandra and they have two sons.
The concert has pieces composed by Jaz Coleman, based on themes from physics such as quantum criticality, emergence and symmetry breaking.
In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for innovative approaches to the theory of strongly correlated electron systems".