Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Andrea Cavalleri
Max Planck Institute & University of Oxford

Citation:

"for pioneering contributions to the development and application of ultra-fast optical spectroscopy to condensed matter systems, and providing insight into lattice dynamics, structural phase transitions, and the non-equilibrium control of solids."

Background:

Andrea Cavalleri is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg (Germany) and a research professor at the University of Oxford (UK). Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2005, he held graduate, postgraduate, and research staff positions at the University of Essen (Germany), at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received laurea (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) degrees from the University of Pavia (Italy). He is best known for his experiments in which intense TeraHertz pulses are used to drive large amplitude and coherent lattice distortions in solids, manipulating their electronic properties, and for demonstrating that one can induce non-equilibrium superconductivity far above the thermodynamic transition temperature. Motivated by the need to probe driven lattices, he has also been majorly involved in the development of ultrafast X-ray techniques, since their inception in the late 1990s through their modern incarnation at X-ray Free Electron Lasers. Cavalleri is a recipient of the 2004 European Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, of the 2015 Max Born Medal, and of the 2015 Dannie Heineman Prize for physics by the Academy of Sciences in Goettingen. He is a fellow of the APS, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the Institute of Physics (UK). In 2017 he was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea.


Selection Committee:

2018 Selection Committee Members: Aron Pinczuk (Chair), Jim Allen (Vice-Chair), Peter Armitage, Jeremy Baumberg, David Tanner