The EPS has two Early Career prizes to be awarded each year – one each for achievements of a mainly theoretical or experimental nature. Those eligible for these awards should have made a substantial contribution to the development or reputation of physics in Europe.

"Early Career" is defined as those individuals in the first 12 years of their career in physics following their first degree or equivalent, with allowance for any career breaks.
Terms and conditions can be found at: https://www.eps.org/page/distinction_prize_ec

Nominations should be made no later than 15th January 2023 to EPS Secretary General, David Lee.

Author: Christian Beck

This year’s prize of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division honours two outstanding scientists, who are pioneers in their respective fields. The 2021 EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize was awarded during the 3^rd  EPS conference “Statistical Physics of Complex Systems” at SISSA/ICTP Trieste, 8-10 September 2021.

Albert-László Barabási  (Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School, Boston & Central European University, Budapest)

was awarded the prize “for his pioneering contributions to the development of complex network science, in particular for his seminal work on scale-free networks, the preferential attachment model, error and attack tolerance in complex networks, controllability of complex networks, the physics of social ties, communities, and human mobility patterns, genetic, metabolic, and biochemical networks, as well as applications in network biology and network medicine”.

Barabási is a pioneer in network science. He played a leading role in the development of this new area of science, not only at its beginning, but also taking an active part in many of its major advances and breakthroughs in the past two decades. His first breakthrough was presented at the turn of the century, in 1999, with the discovery (together with Reka Albert) that many real-world networks exhibit a scale-free structure, with the number of interactions of each component spanning orders of magnitude. This discovery exposed a deep universality, observed in networks from social, biological and technological domains. In a broader perspective, this discovery in 1999 is often considered as the birth of network science. He went further to introduce a statistical physics model for the emergence of scale-free phenomena, the preferential attachment model, one of the most cited papers in the history of physics. His work has connected researchers from different disciplines in an interdisciplinary way. In biology – his work has shown the crucial role of genetic, metabolic and biochemical networks in modeling cellular processes. In medicine – he has introduced the concept of network medicine, linking pathologies based on shared genetic roots, and predicting novel therapeutics. In social systems – his works have uncovered the underlying physics of social ties, communities and human mobility patterns.

The impact of Barabási’s research activity is well beyond the borders of physics, touching many interdisciplinary fields, representing a major extension in the range of applicability of statistical physics, reflected by the 270000 citations that his work has received. It embraces a vast array of research areas including social network analysis, internet and information technology, and biology and medicine. He contributed to the evidence that the scaling of networks is not a feature of man-made systems only, but characterizes e.g. metabolic networks as well. Today the concepts and tools introduced by him in network science are used on a daily basis by a huge number of scientists to study the millions of networks characterizing living and man-made complex systems. 

Angelo Vulpiani (Sapienza University, Rome)

was award the prize “for his seminal contributions to statistical and nonlinear physics, touching fundamentally important issues in dynamical systems theory and statistical mechanics, including the mechanism of stochastic resonance, multifractality of invariant sets of dynamical systems, the dynamics and multifractal properties of turbulent flows, chaos in Hamiltonian systems, and the limits of predictability in complex systems”.

Vulpiani is an outstanding physicist who has made seminal contributions to statistical and nonlinear physics. His research interests are distinguished by their strong connection to fundamental issues of statistical mechanics and to the works of classics like Boltzmann, Kolmogorov and Khinchin.

Over the years he has also built up a strong environment in Rome with many young researchers who have gone on to contribute elsewhere. Furthermore, he is a prolific author of books for the general scientific public, both in Italian and in English, as well as the author of several well-regarded monographs. His immense productivity is reflected by almost 500 co-authored scientific publications.  Most relevant, some of his works mark major break-throughs in their field or have opened up completely new fields of research. The most prominent example is stochastic resonance which, in 1981, was introduced by him together with Roberto Benzi, Alfonso Sutera, and the current (2021) physics nobel prize winner Giorgio Parisi. This developed into an immensely active research area afterwards.

In 1984, Vulpiani (together with Paladin) showed that multifractality (originally defined by Mandelbrot in a purely mathematical setting) is of relevance for the characterization of invariant sets in dynamical systems, and also in turbulent flows. Today, the concept of multifractality is an inherent part of dynamical systems theory and also highly relevant for data analysis, where it has moved into the time domain, i.e. it is used to characterize a variety of measured time series observed in many applications. Other important works of his are his contributions to chaos in Hamiltonian systems and the equipartition of energy (follow-ups of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem), his contributions to diffusion and transport in various nonlinear settings, and his repeated efforts to understanding, defining, and investigating complexity in general.

The prizes of the Division also contain the EPS-SNPD Early Career Prize, which is traditionally shared by two younger scientists and which was also awarded in Trieste. This year the prize went to Federico Battiston and Caterina De Bacco.

Federico Battiston (Central European University, Vienna)

was honoured for “for his outstanding work on nonlinear dynamics and emergent collective phenomena in multilayer and higher-order networks, including diffusion, synchronization, social and evolutionary processes”.

Caterina De Bacco (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tuebingen)

was honoured for “her outstanding work on statistical physics of random walkers on random graphs, stochastic search processes, routing optimization on networks and effective algorithms for community detection”.

Due to the Covid-19 situation, the conference in Trieste was a hybrid conference, with many participants participating online, but some participants being present in person as well. The photograph shows the prize winners and some members of the Board of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division. From left to right: Federico Battiston, Erik Aurell, Angelo Vulpiani, Albert-László Barabási (on screen), Christian Beck, Caterina De Bacco, Raul Toral, Guido Caldarelli.

Authors: French Physical Society & Swiss Physical Society

The French Physical Society and the Swiss Physical Society  are proud to announce the 2021 winner of the Charpak-Ritz Prize:

Marie-Emmanuelle Couprie

image credit: Philippe Berteaud

Marie-Emmanuelle Couprie, researcher at the 2.75 GeV electron synchrotron SOLEIL, located south of Paris, has received this award for her outstanding contributions "in light sources using particle accelerators to emit synchrotron radiation of high spectral purity and high degrees of longitudinal and transverse coherence".

Dr. Couprie is the head of the Magnetism and Insertion Device group at SOLEIL and she is in charge of piloting the Free Electron Laser activities. She is an expert of Free Electron Laser theory and applications, she has an outstanding track record of referred publications, and she is strongly involved in the development of technologies with industries.

The Swiss Physical Society congratulates Marie-Emmanuelle Couprie warmly on this prestigious award. [More: spf-website, sps-website].

Marie-Emmanuelle Couprie will receive the Charpak-Ritz medal on 1 September 2021 in the award ceremony of the annual meeting, jointly organised by the Swiss and Austrian physical societies, 31 August to 3 September 2021 in Innsbruck, Austria, where she will also present her work in a plenary talk to the participants of the conference.

The European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) has announced the winners of the 2020 Accelerator Prizes. The prizes were presented on 14 May in the context of the International Particle Accelerator Conference. It had been planned to hold IPAC’20 in Caen, France. Due to the restrictions resulting from the Covid-19 epidemic, the conference was not held as a presential meeting, but the oral program including a live presentation of the award session was made available under https://www.ipac20.org/.

Prof. Lucio Rossi of CERN, receives the Rolf Wideröe Prize for outstanding work in the accelerator field. He is rewarded for his pioneering role in the development of superconducting magnet technology for accelerators and experiments, its application to complex projects in High Energy Physics including strongly driving industrial capability, and for his tireless effort in promoting the field of accelerator science and technology.

The Gersch Budker Prize, for a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field, is awarded to Dr. Hideaki Hotchi, J-PARC. He receives the prize for his achievements in the commissioning of the J-PARC Rapid Cycling Synchrotron, with sustained 1 MW operation at unprecedented low levels of beam loss made possible by his exceptional understanding of complex beam dynamics processes, thereby laying the foundations for future high power proton synchrotrons worldwide.

The Frank Sacherer Prize, for an individual in the early part of his or her career goes to to Dr. Johannes Steinmann, ANL, for his significant contribution to the development and demonstration of ultra-fast accelerator instrumentation using THz technology, having the potential for major impact on the field of electron bunch-by-bunch diagnostics.

For further information, visit: https://www.eps.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=85227&id=143442 .

The first 2019 Vladilen Letokhov Medal, jointly presented by the European Physical Society and the Russian Academy of Sciences is awarded to

• Prof. Dr. Ferenc Krausz, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and Chair for Experimental Physics Laser Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich.

The prize is awarded to Prof. Krausz “for his contribution to the development of high-field laser physics, in particular for pioneering attosecond physics, through which real-time views of electron motion in atoms, molecules, and solids have become possible”.

Ferenc Krausz studied Electrical Engineering and Physics in Budapest, received his Ph.D. and Habilitation in laser physics at the Vienna University of Technology (VUT) in 1991 and 1993, respectively, where he became full professor in 1999. In Vienna, he and his co-workers were able, for the first time, to generate and measure light pulses of attosecond duration. Since 2004, he has been director at MPQ and chair of experimental physics – laser physics – at LMU Munich, in Garching, Germany. He also founded the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Garching, which he leads as director. With his seminal advancements in few-cycle laser technology, Ferenc Krausz and his team have pioneered the generation and application of ultrashort, intense optical light pulses with tailored waveform. These permit to reproducibly generate isolated attosecond pulses, and – together with them – to probe electron motion in atoms, molecules, and solids on their natural, attosecond-femtosecond timescale. Among the exciting applications of his work is the possibility to implement light-wave driven electronics for scaling ultrafast information processing to the petahertz regime. Furthermore, Ferenc Krausz and his team made seminal contributions to the development of high-peak and high-average power ultrafast laser systems with tailored light fields. These enable the generation of well-controlled high-energy photons, electrons and ions for novel applications in cancer medicine. His most recent efforts focus on evaluating the potential of infrared molecular fingerprinting of blood for early cancer detection.

Ferenc Krausz is a highly-cited scientist and has been named as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate (Thomson Reuters, 2015). He has been awarded numerous honours and is a member of a variety of national and international scientific associations, such as OSA, the German National Academy, Leopoldina, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

More info about the Vladilen Letokhov Medal on the EPS QEOD website