Boston College, USA

“For her outstanding contributions to the discovery of the nonlinear Hall effect related to the quantum geometry of Bloch electrons”.

Dr. Qiong Ma is now an assistant professor at Boston College. She received her Ph.D in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States in 2016. She played a key role in the experimental discovery of the nonlinear Hall effect at zero-magnetic field in a 2D semiconductor, bilayer WTe2 in the 1T’ structure. She revealed the nature of this unconventional Hall effect: the current-voltage characteristic is quadratic instead of linear and the Hall voltage is measured at twice the frequency of the input current, clearly demonstrating the second-order nature of the Hall response; and the nonlinear Hall response shows multiple peaks and sign reversals as a function of carrier density. These features were also analyzed by DFT calculation of the Berry curvature dipole in bilayer WTe2. The agreement between experiment and theory provided compelling evidence of the quantum geometrical origin of the observed nonlinear Hall effect, and has stimulated much further research.

Cornell University, USA

“For his contributions to the visualization electronic properties of superconductors and magnetic topological insulators using scanning tunnelling microscopy”.

Dr. Xiaolong Liu is now working as a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D in Applied Physics from Northwestern University in the United States in 2018. Dr. Liu has been studying quantum materials using scanning tunnelling microscopy. He has studied the effect of disorder in the quantum Hall state of a three-dimensional magnetic topological insulator, determining the spatial dependence of the Dirac mass gap. He has also contributed to the development of Josephson scanning microscopy, unveiling a Cooper pair density wave and visualizing the superfluid density and velocity of the flowing electronic fluid in superconducting NbSe2.

University of Washington, USA

“For his transformative contributions to the field of moiré quantum materials including pressure-tuning of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene”.

Dr. Matthew Yankowitz is now an assistant professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Washington and also a WRF Innovation Assistant Professor in Clean Energy at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D in physics from the University of Arizona in the United States in 2015. Dr. Yankowitz has been working on scanning probes, transport, and pressure-tuning to explore the electronic properties of two-dimensional materials. As a graduate student, he studied the Hofstadter physics of graphene sheets. Recently Dr. Yankowitz has discovered that superconductivity and correlated insulator states can be induced in twisted bilayer graphene by applying pressure. He extended his research to related bilayer/bilayer and monolayer/bilayer graphene systems, which are new important platforms to realize novel phenomena including the quantum anomalous Hall effect.

Stanford University, USA

“For the invention of sensitive means to measure the ac elastocaloric effect, and for revealing its relevance to the study of quantum materials”.

Dr. Matthias Ikeda is a Research Scientist at the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials and the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D from Vienna University of Technology in 2015. Dr. Ikeda uses thermodynamic and transport measurements of quantum materials at low temperatures to advance the understanding of correlation phenomena. His invention, development and use of new measurement techniques enabled him to make a number of impactful discoveries. For instance, his strain-tuning experiments have provided strong evidence for a nematic quantum critical point in iron-based superconductors, while his sensitive ac elastocaloric effect measurements have revealed new insights to nemato-elastic coupling in the same materials.

Lancaster University, UK

“For observations at low temperatures of half-quantum vortices, time crystals and magnon Bose-Einstein condensation in superfluid 3He”.

Samuli Autti is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at Lancaster University in the UK, where he was also a Wihuri Foundation (Finland) post-doctoral fellow in 2017-2019. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Aalto University in Finland in 2017. His research is focused on experiments at ultra-low temperatures, in particular on superfluid ³He. The major discoveries he has authored include the observation of half-quantum vortices in ³He, concluding four decades of investigations, and one of the very first implementations of time (quasi) crystals, emerging from a quasiparticle Bose-Einstein condensate. He is also known for exploiting and publicizing the conceptual connections between superfluid ³He and other, seemingly distant fields, such as particle physics and cosmology.

University of Minnesota, USA

“For observations at low temperatures of single-electron silicon qubits, graphene electron-optics, a quantum transistor, and confinement of charged excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides.”

Ke Wang obtained his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Princeton University in 2014 after working with Prof. Jason Petta on first generation single-electron silicon quantum devices. During his post-doctoral research at Harvard University with Prof. Philip Kim, he studied novel gate-defined (vdW) nanostructures, in which he demonstrated relativistic electron-optics, quantum Hall tunneling spectroscopy, and quantum confinement of excitons in 2D van der Waals (vdW) materials. He joined University of Minnesota as an assistant Professor in Physics in 2018. His current research interests include exotic scorrelated behavior and mesoscopic quantum phenomena in novel gate-defined vdW material platforms.

Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany

“For his pioneering development of low temperature measurement techniques, notably concerning the application of uniaxial stress, and his experiments on unconventional superconductivity”.

Clifford Hicks received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009, investigating unconventional superconductors. The work involved using a scanning SQUID magnetometer to search for chiral edge states in Sr₂RuO₄, and the development of a new method, based on local measurements using a scanning SQUID susceptometer, for measuring the penetration depth of superconductors. For his postdoctoral work at the University of St Andrews, with Professor Andrew Mackenzie, he focused in part on transport and cantilever torque magnetometry on delafossite oxide metals. He also developed a piezoelectric-based uniaxial pressure cell, and applied it to study the superconductor Sr₂RuO₄. In 2014, Clifford joined the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, to lead a new research group, focusing on the effects of uniaxial pressure on unconventional superconductors and magnets, and further development of the technique. Remarkably it was shown that strain can double T_c of the unconventional superconductor Sr₂RuO₄. With two former students from St Andrews, he has also co-founded a company that has successfully commercialized piezoelectric-based pressure cells.

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

“For his important contributions to two main areas of low temperature and nanoscale physics:  superconductivity in the edge modes of two-dimensional topological insulators; spin-dependent quantum transport in one-dimensional semiconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling”.

His results have elucidated key aspects of the electronic properties of these novel materials, which are candidates for quantum and classical information processing.

Vlad Pribiag received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Cornell University, investigating the magnetization dynamics magnetic vortices driven by spin-transfer torques. For his postdoctoral work at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, he focused on quantum transport in low-dimensional materials with strong spin-orbit coupling, including single-spin dynamics in quantum dots and superconducting transport in 2D topological insulator devices. During this time he was the recipient of a VENI award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Dr. Pribiag then joined the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota in fall 2014. His current work focuses on the physics of nanoscale devices based on novel low-dimensional materials, such as 2D topological insulators, complex oxide interfaces, and semiconductor nanowires. He has recently been awarded a Sloan Fellowship (2017) and an NSF CAREER Award (2016).

Prof. Devoret was elected for the Prize by a Selection Committee consisting of Dr. Rob Blaauwgeers (founder and managing director of BlueFors Cryogenics Oy), Professors John Clarke (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Andrew Cleland (University of Chicago, USA), Vladimir Dmitriev (Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow, Russia), Pertti Hakonen (chair, Aalto University), Kimitoshi Kono (RIKEN, Japan), Jukka Pekola (Aalto University), George Pickett (Lancaster University, UK), and Tuija Pulkkinen (vice rector of Aalto University).

Michel H. Devoret was born in France. He graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris in 1975, and received his PhD from Paris University in 1982. For more than four decades he has pioneered the discovery, understanding and application of quantum phenomena revealed in the low temperature regime. His contributions to the field of quantum electronics have set the stage for major advances in our knowledge of, and control over macroscopic quantum devices and systems. His scientific and technological foundations in superconducting circuits hold great potential to emerge as a dominant technology for quantum computation.

Prof. Devoret is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003) and a member of the French Academy of Sciences (2008). He has received the Ampere Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve, 1991), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands (1996) and the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (together with Daniel Esteve, Hans Mooij and Yasunobu Nakamura, 2004). He is also a recipient of the John Stewart Bell Prize, which he received jointly with Rob Schoelkopf in 2013. In 2014, he has been awarded, together with John Martinis and Rob Schoelkopf, the Fritz London Memorial Prize.

The Olli V. Lounasmaa Prize Fund owes to the generosity of Kiti Müller and the members of Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters for the endowment of the revenues obtained upon publishing the Memoirs of Olli V. Lounasmaa.

Read more from the attached release.

About the Prize: http://physics.aalto.fi/en/about/olli_v-lounasmaa_memorial_prize/

Aalto PHYS news: http://physics.aalto.fi/en/current/news/2016-08-16-003/