Professor Frank Steglich receives the Fritz London Memorial Prize

The pioneering work for which Professor Steglich is honored is his profound contribution to the development of the field of superconductivity. The so-called heavy fermion superconductors, first brought to prominence by Professor Steglich’s 1979 work on CeCu2Si2, were immediately recognized to lie outside the paradigms laid down in the famous 1957 theory of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer. Their discovery led quickly to that of several other important classes of superconductors with equally unconventional properties. The resulting revolution in our understanding of superconductivity can therefore be sourced back to the remarkable research of Professor Steglich and the other pioneers of heavy fermion superconductivity. Fritz London was renowned for his own, earlier, contributions to the field of superconductivity, so it is particularly appropriate for Professor Steglich to be a winner of the prize named for him. We offer our warmest congratulations to Frank for this richly deserved recognition.

The award ceremony will take place during the 29th International Low Temperature Physics Conference (LT29) in August 2020 in Sapporo, Japan.

Established in 1957, the Fritz London Memorial Prize is awarded every three years and honors outstanding experimental and theoretical achievements in the field of low temperature physics.

The research at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI CPfS) in Dresden aims to discover and understand new materials with unusual properties.

In close cooperation, chemists and physicists (including chemists working on synthesis, experimentalists and theoreticians) use the most modern tools and methods to examine how the chemical composition and arrangement of atoms, as well as external forces, affect the magnetic, electronic and chemical properties of the compounds.

New quantum materials, physical phenomena and materials for energy conversion are the result of this interdisciplinary collaboration.

The MPI CPfS is part of the Max Planck Society and was founded in 1995 in Dresden. It consists of around 280 employees, of which about 180 are scientists, including 70 doctoral students.

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