Wernsdorfer wins Olivier Kahn International Award

The MAGMANet network of Excellence and the members of the Olivier Kahn Award International Jury have announced that the first winner of the Olivier Kahn International Award is Wolfgang Wernsdorfer.

The award, an “Olivier Kahn Medal”, designed by La Monnaie de Paris, comes with a prize of 10,000 Euros (US$18,000), that can be used for research or to participate in major international conferences. Winners of the Kahn Medal, which is designed to promote the visibility of young scientists, must have received their PhD. not more than ten years ago. Wolfgang Wernsdorfer was born in Würzburg, Germany, in 1966, received his education in Physics in Würzburg, Lyon, and Grenoble, where he is at present Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During the first years of his scientific career he has developed a unique device for measuring magnetic properties with a billion times higher sensitivity than commercial magnetometers. His instrument allows observing the magnetic behaviour of molecular nano-magnets containing less than a thousand magnetic centres. Wernsdorfer has exploited this opportunity to get a deep insight into peculiar phenomena such as the tunneling of magnetisation in molecular clusters. Almost all groups working world-wide on synthesising molecular magnets benefit from the collaboration with him; about 250 systems with possible -behaviour have been studied so far in Wolfgang’s laboratory. Wernsdorfer has played a leading role in pushing decisively the knowledge on molecular magnetism to where we are now. Wolfgang Wernsdorfer says: “Everyday life is full of useful magnets, solids, oxides, metals and alloys. On the contrary, molecules are most often considered as non-magnetic materials. However, recent discoveries show that molecules can bear large magnetic moments that can have a stable orientation like traditional magnets. They have therefore been called single-molecule magnets and they might be the ultimate limit for information storage. They do not only exhibit the classical macroscale property of a magnet, but also new quantum properties such as quantum tunnelling of magnetisation and quantum phase interference, the properties of a microscale entity. Such quantum phenomena are advantageous for some challenging applications, e.g. molecular information storage or quantum computing. In order to explore these possibilities, I am building new and very precise setups, developing new methods and strategies, and studying the best candidate systems, together with my colleagues physicists, chemists and engineers”.

The Award will be presented on the occasion of the First European Conference in Molecular Magnetism, organised by the MAGMANet European Network of Excellence, to be held in Tomar, Portugal, on October 10-15. The laureate will present an invited lecture on this occasion.

The next Olivier Kahn Award competition will take place in 2008.