Professor Gregor E. Morfill
The recipient of the 2011 James Clerk Maxwell Prize awarded by the American Physical Society (APS) is Professor Gregor E. Morfill of the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik. He received the Maxwell Prize on 16 November 2011 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Division of Plasma Physics held in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The prize consists of $10,000 and a certificate bearing the following citation:
For pioneering and seminal contributions to the field of dusty plasmas, including work leading to the discovery of plasma crystals, to an explanation for the complicated structure of Saturn’s rings, and to microgravity dusty plasma experiments conducted first on parabolic-trajectory flights and then on the International Space Station.
The purpose of the prize is to recognize outstanding contributions to the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of the properties of highly ionized gases of natural and laboratory origins. It was established by Maxwell Laboratories, Inc. in 1975, and is currently sponsored by General Atomics. The selection is made by a committee appointed by the President of the American Physical Society.
Professor Gregor E. Morfill received his B.Sc. degree from Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, in 1967 and his Ph.D. degree in 1971. Subsequently, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute für extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) then to the Max-Planck Institute für Kernphysik, before accepting the position of Director at MPE in 1984.
Professor Morfill has worked in many areas of physics: magnetospheric, cosmic ray, star and planet formation, planetary rings, nonlinear dynamics, complex (dusty) plasmas—a field which he helped initiate through the discovery of plasma crystals and which he continued to develop into an important interdisciplinary research field; and “plasma medicine”—the application of cold atmospheric plasmas in health care.
Among his many scientific discoveries, concentrating here only on “dusty plasmas,” are seminal basic theory papers on charged dust transport in magnetospheres (in particular Jupiter’s magnetosphere), the origin and formation of “Spokes” (structures of dimension 1000 s km formed by micron-sized particles in Saturn’s B-Ring), and dusty dynamics in the heliosphere (the Zodiacal light particles). In his experimental activities and interpretation, there is the above-mentioned field of complex plasmas (ions, electrons, charged microparticles, neutrals)—the discovery of plasma crystals, the liquid-solid phase transition in complex plasmas, kinetic (particle) observations of electrorheology in complex plasmas, self-organization and lane formation in counter-driven two-component systems, as well as phase separation (the oil-water problem) observed near the limit of cooperative behavior. These generic physical processes are also of interest in other fields (e.g., colloidal physics, lattice gases, molecular ions, hydrodynamics, etc.). Through research conducted over the past eleven years on the International Space Station (under microgravity conditions—to escape from the gravitational effect on the microparticles), these processes become “visible,” both “particle resolved” and in “slow motion” (at all physically relevant time scales) for the first time.
Professor Morfill has also served the physics community tirelessly and with great distinction over the past thirty years, participating in various government and agency committees, as an editorial member of several journals, as a reviewer, and as a mentor of about 100 Ph.D. students.
Professor Morfill’s commendations include honorary professorships at Leeds University (UK) and the University of Arizona (Tucson), an honorary doctorate at the Technical University Berlin, membership in the Russian Academy of Science, and numerous prizes and awards for research and technology transfer.
