APS to Present Awards at March Meeting

At its annual March meeting, held this year in Indianapolis, Indiana, the American Physical Society will present 15 prizes and awards for distinguished research or service.

The occasion will be the debut of the George E. Valley Jr Prize, a biannual prize created at the bequest of its namesake to recognize one individual, under age 30, for his or her outstanding scientific contribution to the knowledge of physics. The inaugural recipient will be David Goldhaber-Gordon, an assistant professor in the department of physics and in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford University. He is being honored for “the discovery and elucidation of the physics of the Kondo effect in single electron transistors.”

APS will give its David Adler Lectureship Award to Chris G. Van de Walle, a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, for his “incisive theoretical contributions to the understanding of the behavior of hydrogen in semiconductors and heterostructure energy band diagrams and the exceptional exposition of this work in the scientific community.”

The LeRoy Apker Award for undergraduate research at a PhD-granting institution will go to Kathryn Todd for her senior thesis, “Studies of Double-Layer Two-Dimensional Electron Gases,” written at Caltech under the supervision of James Eisenstein. Todd is now a graduate student at Stanford. The Apker Award for undergraduate research at a non–PhD-granting institution will be given to Robert Wagner, a senior at Illinois State University, for his studies of intense-laser physics theory done under Rainer Grobe and Charles Su.

The Biological Physics Prize will go to Carlos Bustamante for his “pioneering work in single molecule biophysics and the elucidation of the fundamental physics principles underlying the mechanical properties and forces involved in DNA replication and transcription.” Bustamante is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the departments of physics and of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize will honor three researchers for “theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems.” The recipients are Jainendra Jain, Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University; Nicholas Read, a professor of physics and applied physics at Yale University; and Robert Willett, a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Timothy J. Bunning will be awarded the John H. Dillon Medal for his “outstanding accomplishments in developing polymer-based materials for optical applications and for elucidating the physics and chemistry underlying their formation.” Bunning is a senior materials research engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The Polymer Physics Prize will go to Thomas Witten, professor in the department of physics, the James Franck Institute and the College of the University of Chicago. The citation praises his “outstanding theoretical contributions to the understanding of polymers and complex fluids.”

James W. Allen and Thomas Timusk will share the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids for their “outstanding contributions to the field of spectroscopy in strongly correlated electron systems leading to elucidation of many-body physics.” Allen is a professor of physics at the University of Michigan and Timusk is a professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster University in Canada.

Robert J. Soulen Jr, a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, will receive the Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science. He is being cited for “developing low-temperature noise thermometry to achieve an absolute thermometer, which now defines the year 2000 International Temperature Scale between 1 mK and 1 K to an accuracy of 0.1%, and for other significant contributions to thermometry measurement over a distinguished career.”

APS will present its Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award to Deborah S. Jin, a JILA fellow, a NIST physicist, and an assistant professor adjoint at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Jin has earned the award for her “innovative realization and exploration of a novel quantum system, the degnerate Fermi atomic gas, and the scientific promise portended by her pioneering work.”

Two researchers will share the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials. The new materials whose discovery is cited by the 2002 prize are “single-wall carbon nanotubes, which can behave like metals or semiconductors, can conduct electricity better than copper, can transmit heat better than diamond, and rank among the strongest materials known.” The recipients are Sumio Iijima and Donald S. Bethune. Iijima is a professor in the department of materials science and engineering at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, and a special research fellow for NEC Corp. Bethune is a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

The Lars Onsager Prize is to be presented to Anatoly I. Larkin, William I. and Bianca M. Fine Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is cited for “elucidating roles of fluctuations and randomness in collective phenomena, including critical behavior of uniaxial ferroelectrics, dependence of critical exponents in four dimensions on symmetry,” and the ways in which “impurity pinning of vortices in superconductors destroys lattice order and controls critical currents.”

APS will give the George E. Pake Prize to Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Corp in Yorktown Heights, New York, and director of research there. He is being honored for his “innovative contributions to the understanding of 1/f noise, the elucidation of surface phases and phase transitions, and his signal accomplishments in managing IBM Corporation’s global research team.”

The Earle K. Plyler Prize will be given to Graham Fleming, professor of chemistry and codirector of the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedicine at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the physical biosciences division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Fleming is being cited for his “seminal work on chemical reaction dynamics in liquids and the dynamics of fundamental biological processes using femtosecond laser spectroscopy.”