Nominations are sought for the Fritz London Memorial Prize for Low Temperature Physics, which will be presented at the International Low Temperature Conference (LT30) in Bilbao, Spain, in August 2025.

The Fritz London Memorial Prize is an international prize supported by the endowment created at Duke University by John Bardeen, a generous gift from the late Horst Meyer, and donations from Oxford Instruments. It is awarded once every three years and is intended to recognize outstanding experimental and theoretical contributions to low temperature physics. Background information and a list of previous London Prize winners can be found at: https://physics.duke.edu/fritz-london-memorial-prize

The members of the 2025 London Memorial Prize Committee are: P. Hakonen (Chair, Aalto U., Finland), Eva Andrei (Rutgers U., USA), Laura Greene (FSU and MagLab, USA), H. Mooij (TU Delft, Netherlands), and Y. Okuda (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan).

Nominations and supporting letters should be sent to the Chair of the Prize Committee:
Prof. Pertti Hakonen
pertti.hakonen@aalto.fi
Subject: London Memorial Prize

The deadline for the receipt of nominations and supporting letters is November 15, 2024.

The nomination letter should clearly state all of the following:

• The basis for the proposed prize.
• Publications on which the nomination is based.
• An assessment of the impact on the low temperature community.
• Relevant biographical information and institutional affiliation.
• Supporting letters (no more than 4) should be submitted together with the nomination materials.

There are no restrictions on who could receive this award. It has been the policy of the committee to avoid giving the award for work that has already been recognized by the Simon Memorial Prize or by other comparable awards. The committee also looks more favorably on recent work as compared to work whose significance has been apparent for a long time.

The Charpak-Ritz Prize 2022  awarded to Laura Baudis, for her leadership in international astro-particle physics collaborations, outreach activities and seminal contributions to dark matter research. 

Laura Baudis is awarded with the 2022 Charpak Ritz Price jointly given by the French Physical Society and the Swiss Physical Society. She has provided significant contributions to an increasingly burning question in astrophysics and cosmology: What holds cosmological structures together and controls the formation and evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way? It remains an enigma that the abundance of all known forms of matter is too low to explain the level of gravitational interaction observed in galaxies, clusters of galaxies and at the largest scales in the universe. This has triggered the hypothesis of ‘dark matter’, which is undetectable by electromagnetic interactions. The dark matter, which accounts for 85% of all matter in the universe, could be made of new elementary particles, such as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The search for WIMPs has been a main pillar of Laura Baudis’ career. 

For more than a decade, experiments using two-phase (liquid and gas) xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) have yielded the world’s best sensitivity in the direct detection of WIMPs. Laura Baudis, who is a professor at University of Zürich, has played a leading role in the development of large xenon detectors with ultra-low backgrounds at their core. These are part of the collaborative XENON programme, which started with XENON10, recently operated XENON1T and currently acquires data with XENONnT.  XENON1T reached the lowest background ever observed in a dark matter detector and observed the very rare two-neutrino double electron capture process in xenon-124, an outstanding result in nuclear physics.  XENON1T is currently world-leading in providing the strongest constraints on WIMP interactions over a broad mass range. To improve the statistical sensitivity even further towards a possible detection of dark matter, an upscaled experiment XENONnT was prepared and started in 2021. Apart from her leading contributions to the TPCs, including the photosensor arrays to observe the xenon scintillation light in the VUV region, Laura Baudis has been assuming key roles in the collaboration: as co-spokesperson, chair of the collaboration board and recently as chair of the science strategy team. Towards the next generation effort DARWIN, which she also co-founded, Laura Baudis has developed crucial experimental setups and prototypes to selectively detect rare photon and electron emission events in a large volume of liquid xenon as a characteristic WIMP signature. It is also important to note that within these larger multi-national research projects a significant part of Laura Baudis’ work has been performed in collaboration with French researchers at LPNHE in Paris and the SUBATECH laboratory in Nantes. 

Next to her complex multi-lateral scientific efforts, Laura Baudis has also been actively involved in outreach activities, giving a TED talk and she features in two documentary movies about Science and Scientists (“Chasing Einstein”, “Eros und Atome” – in German).

• https://www.sfpnet.fr/laura-baudis-laureate-du-prix-charpak-ritz-2022
  
• https://www.sps.ch/en/awards/charpak-ritz-award/winner-2022

The 2021 EPS Hannes Alfvén Prize is awarded to Prof. Sergei Igorevich Krasheninnikov. The 2022 EPS Hannes Alfvén Prize is awarded to Prof. Xavier Garbet. 

Read the complete announce on the website of the EPS Plasma Division.

The Ampère house and museum in Poleymieux near Lyon, France. Photo: Christian Barberon/Wikimedia Commons

Author: Alfonso San Miguel

Wednesday, October 6 2021, the Ampère Museum was inaugurated as an EPS Historic Site. This is the fifth site in France and it is dedicated to André-Marie Ampère.

The Ampère family home, where André-Marie spent his childhood and studied brilliantly with his father, had an exceptional destiny. The state of Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or (Rhône) where it is located, about fifteen kilometers from Lyon, was sequestered for the benefit of the Nation in 1793, when the French Revolution condemned the future scientist's father to death. Restored to the family two years later, it fell to Ampère in 1812, after the death of his mother. He relinquished it ten years later when he settled permanently in Paris.

André-Marie Ampère spent a very large part of his childhood and youth in this house, soon after his birth in 1775 until he was 29 years old. Without attending school, he read Diderot’s Encyclopedia and learned to scrutinize Nature and to understand the mathematics, physics and chemistry of his time. It was during this period that emerged his first ideas about the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Few years later, in 1820 he established the first mathematical relationships between these two physical phenomena. By giving the name of Ampère to the international unit of electrical current, the whole world saluted his fundamental discoveries, which gave rise to electrodynamics.

It took a century for the Poleymieux estate to regain the memory of its prestigious former owner. It was on the advice of Paul Janet, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, that two wealthy American industrialists, Hernand and Sosthène Behn, bought the estate in 1928. They donated the estate to the French Society of Electricians (SEE), which entrusted it to the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère (SAAMA), an association created to manage and develop a Museum of Electricity and to perpetuate the memory of the illustrious Lyon native.  The Museum of Electricity was inaugurated on 1st July 1931.

The EPS Historic Site ceremony, which was part of the "Ampère 200 ans" (Ampère 200 years) programme of commemorations for the bicentenary of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in electrodynamics, was sponsored by Serge Haroche, 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the morning, Serge Haroche gave a lecture at the University of Sciences of Lyon  to more than 400 participants on the history of light. He highlighted the importance of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in the unification of electricity, magnetism and optics. At the end of the day, the ceremony continued at the Ampère Museum where the commemorative plaque was unveiled by Serge Haroche and Luc Bergé in front of a hundred people, representatives of the academic world of Lyon, the electricity industry and learned societies. The ceremony was conducted together by François Gerin, president of the SEE, who also read a message from Gérard Mourou, 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics and sponsor of “Ampère 200 ans”, and by the President of the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère, Alfonso San Miguel, who nominated the site.

FLTR: Guy Wormser (SFP), François Gerin (SEE), Serge Haroche, Luc Bergé (EPS), Gabriel Fioni (representative of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research),
Corinne Cardona (major of Poleymieux) and Alfonso San Miguel (SAAMA and SFP) - Photo: Alfonso San Miguel

Prof. Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark has been elected the winner of the 2020 EPS-QEOD Prize for Research in Laser Science and Applications for his “seminal contributions to surface-plasmon polaritons and the developments of plasmonic metasurfaces”.

More information on the website of the EPS QEOD.