German Society Bestows Awards

At its annual meeting last March in Leipzig, the German Physical Society (DPG) presented its medals and prizes for 2002, including the new Hertha Sponer Prize, which recognizes young women’s outstanding work in physics. Karina Morgenstern, who is doing her habilitation at the Free University of Berlin, is the first recipient of this prize. The society honored her work on the dynamics of surface phenomena. Her research focuses on nanostructures and the behavior of molecules on metallic surfaces.

The Max Planck Medal, the society’s most important award for theoretical physics, went to Jürgen Ehlers for his contributions to the general theory of relativity, to cosmology, and to general-relativistic kinetic theory and hydrodynamics. Ehlers is an emeritus professor of physics at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) near Potsdam.

J. Peter Toennies received the society’s most important award for experimental physics, the Stern–Gerlach Medal, for his contributions to surface and cluster physics, especially to helium atom scattering from surfaces and to the spectroscopy of molecules in helium nanodroplets. He is an emeritus director and administrative director of the Max Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Göttingen. He also is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Göttingen and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Bonn.

Michael Bonitz, a privatdozent (roughly equivalent to an associate professor) at the University of Rostock, received the Gustav Hertz Prize, which is given to outstanding young physicists. Bonitz was recognized for his contributions to the nonequilibrium many-body theory of Coulomb systems in plasmas and semiconductors.

The DPG, jointly with the French Physical Society, gave Jean-Marie Flaud the Gentner–Kastler Prize in recognition of his contributions to high-resolution molecular spectroscopy, particularly his work on water vapor and ozone. He is a director of research at CNRS in Orsay, France.

Hanns Ruder, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Tübingen, garnered the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize for his contributions to computational physics and his dedication to visualizing complex physical phenomena using novel computer techniques.

The Walter Schottky Prize, awarded for outstanding contributions by young researchers in condensed matter physics, went to Harald Reichert, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Metals Research in Stuttgart. He was cited for his discovery of fivefold local symmetry in liquids near solid surfaces.