At its annual March meeting, which will be held this year from 12 to 15 March, the American Physical Society will honor 17 individuals for outstanding research and service.
Alan Harold Luther and Victor John Emery will share the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize “for their fundamental contribution to the theory of interacting electrons in one dimension.” Luther is a professor at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Copenhagen and Emery is a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics will go to Donald M. Eigler, an IBM fellow at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He will be honored “for his seminal contribution to nanotechnology and for pioneering a new methodology for probing matter at the atomic scale.”
The Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, given jointly by APS and the American Institute of Physics, will be presented to Vladimir Igorevich Arnol’d “for his fundamental contributions to our understanding of dynamics and of singularities of maps with profound consequences for mechanics, astrophysics, statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and optics.” Arnol’d is a professor at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and also a professor at the Centre de Recherche en Mathématiques de la Décision, University of Paris IX.
Masao Doi will receive the Polymer Physics Prize “for pioneering contributions to the theory of dynamics and rheology of entangled polymers and complex fluids.” Doi is a professor of computational science and engineering at Nagoya University in Japan.
Louis E. Brus, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, will receive the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics. The citation credits him with “establishing the field of semiconductor nanocrystals through innovative synthesis, spectroscopy, and theory.”
The James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials will be given to Arthur Gossard, a professor of materials and electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gossard is being recognized “for more than twenty-five years of major and continuing contributions to the science and technology of molecular beam epitaxy, and for the growth of heterogeneous compound semiconductor structures that have furthered both device applications and physical understanding of low-dimensional structures.”
Bertrand I. Halperin will receive the Lars Onsager Prize “for his wide-ranging contributions to statistical physics and quantum fluids, especially the elucidation of the quantum Hall effect and other low-dimensional electronic phenomena.” The citation also credits “his exemplary leadership in bringing theory to bear on the understanding of experiments.” Halperin is the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University and the scientific director for Harvard’s Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures.
Lewis S. Edelheit, a senior researcher and technical adviser at General Electric Co, will be honored with the George E. Pake Prize. He is being recognized “for outstanding technical contributions to fluoroscopic x-ray systems and fast scan, ‘fan-beam’ computer x-ray tomography systems, and for leadership in managing the development, engineering, and marketing of world-leading commercial medical imaging systems.”
APS will present the Earl K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy to W. E. Moerner, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University. He is being honored “for the development of single molecule optical detection methods that remove ensemble averaging from spectroscopic measurements, thereby revealing the behavior of individual molecules.” The citation also credits him with “the application of these methods to the study of spectral diffusion, photon anti-bunching, photon hole burning and intermittent fluorescence in solids, proteins, and liquids.”
Ellen D. Williams will be given the David Adler Lectureship Award “for her elegant experimental exploration of the structures and phase transitions of surfaces and for her effective communication on this subject in lectures and publications.” Williams is a Distinguished University Professor, with a joint appointment in the physics department and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Three undergraduate students will receive Leroy Apker Awards. The Apker Award for students at schools that do not grant a PhD will go to Jacob Krich, who received his BA in 2000 from Swarthmore College and is currently at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. The award cites his work with Swarthmore professor Peter Collings on correlation length and chirality of isotropic short-range order in nematic and chiral nematic liquid crystals. Two Apkers will be awarded in the category of PhD-granting institutions. One will go to Heather J. Lynch for her work at Princeton University with Duncan Haldane and the late Barbara Cooper on “A Kondo Box: Coulomb Blockade and the Kondo Effect in Iron-Doped Copper Nanoparticles.” The other will go to Steven J. Oliver, who worked on laser cooling to high-phase-space densities with David Weiss at the University of California, Berkeley. Lynch is doing graduate work at Harvard University and Oliver has remained at Berkeley to pursue his PhD.
The John H. Dillon Medal will be presented to Klaus Schmidt-Rohr, a chemistry professor at Iowa State University. The citation praises “his creative development of new NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance] methods and their insightful use to elucidate polymer structure and dynamics.”
The Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science will go to James E. Faller, who is chief of the quantum physics division at NIST in Boulder, Colorado. He will be honored “for the development of sensitive gravitational detectors and their successful application to the study of physics and geophysics.”
Henry R. Glyde will be recognized with the John Wheatley Award “for his enduring commitment and multifaceted contributions to the development of physics in Thailand, which include innovative creation of scientific links between North American research universities and Chulalongkorn University, inspiring collaboration with leading Thai physicists, and the marshaling of financial and intellectual resources to establish new regional research centers.” Glyde is a professor of physics at the University of Delaware.
