Balibar, Davis, and Packard to Share London Prize

Sébastien Balibar, J. C. Séamus Davis, and Richard E. Packard will receive the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics this August at the 24th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics in Orlando, Florida.

Balibar is being recognized for “his work on the surfaces of helium crystals, especially their roughening transitions, their quantum dynamics, and their instability under stress, for his study of cavitation in liquid helium at negative pressure using high amplitude acoustic waves and for his early experiments on quantum evaporation of superfluid ⁴He,” according to the citation. He is a director of research at CNRS and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Davis, a professor of physics at Cornell University, is being honored for “his studies of superfluid ³He weak link arrays revealing a rich variety of phenomena including quantum interference,” and for his “invention and development of spectroscopic imaging STM [scanning tunneling microscope] techniques and their application in studies of individual impurity/dopant atom effects, vortex-core electronic structure, quasiparticle interference effects, and alternative ordered states in the cuprate superconductors.”

A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Packard is being recognized for “his studies in superfluid helium of important macroscopic quantum effects on the single quantum level”—in particular for his detection of single quantized vortex lines, photography of quantized vortices, and proof of quantization of circulation in ³He—and for “his development of weak link arrays in both ³He and ⁴He and the discoveries of a rich variety of related phenomena including quantum interference.”

The prize is presented every three years. It is accompanied this year by a cash award of $24 000, which will be divided evenly among the three winners.