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Professor Gilbert Lonzarich of the Physics department has been selected for the 2015 Kamerlingh Onnes prize, in recognition of his 'visionary experiments concerning the emergence of superconductivity for strongly renormalized quasiparticles at the edge of magnetic order'.

The work of Lonzarich - his scientific discoveries, his innovations in material quality and experimental technique - has transformed our thinking about strongly correlated electron systems. Among his many profound contributions, the most important is perhaps his discovery that superconductivity occurs ubiquitously on the border of what was considered one of the harshest environments for superconductivity: magnetism. Indeed the theme of a superconducting dome induced by the suppression of density wave order is now widespread and familiar in contemporary condensed matter physics, and it is fair to say that it is the work of Lonzarich and collaborators that established this fundamental
idea. The tour de force experimental program of Lonzarich simultaneously shattered experimental limitations on sample quality, signal detection sensitivity, high magnetic fields, high applied pressures, and low temperatures, and led to the discovery of unconventional superconductivity under applied pressure in a series of magnetic materials.

Lonzarich is widely recognized in the scientifc world for his pioneering work. Other awards he has received include the Europhysics (Hewlett-Packard) Prize for Experimental Physics 1989 (shared with H. Ott and F. Steglich), the Max Born Prize and Medal 1991, the Guthrie Medal 2007, and the Rumford Medal 2010. He has been honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and as Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

The Kamerlingh Onnes Prize was established in 2000 by the organizers of the International Conference on the Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity (M2S) in honor of Prof. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes who discovered superconductivity in 1911. It is awarded every three years at the M2S Conference, for outstanding experiments which illuminate the nature of superconductivity other than materials. It will be presented to Lonzarich on August 24th, 2015 during the 11th International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity in Geneva, Switzerland. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, Publisher of Physica C - Superconductivity and its Applications. More information is available at http://www.m2s-2015.ch/kamerlingh-onnes-prize.php.

Date awarded

23 August 2015

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