The Fritz London Memorial Prize Selection Committee is proud to announce the winners of this year’s Fritz London Memorial Prize. The award is widely recognized as the highest international honor in low-temperature physics.
The 2025 awardees are (in alphabetical order):
Robert Hallock:
“For his many innovative achievements in the physics of liquid helium films and his pioneering work on supertransport in solid helium-4, which includes the paradigm-changing discovery of giant isochoric compressibility.”
John Saunders:
“In recognition of his pioneering research on topological and strongly correlated quantum fluids and solids in reduced dimensions, enabled by his development of cryogenic and measurement technology to open research opportunities spanning quantum materials to fundamental physics.”
Ali Yazdani:
“For cutting-edge discoveries of the interplay between correlated phases and superconductivity in cuprates, heavy fermion systems, and graphene using advanced low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy.”
Established in 1957 by John Bardeen, the prize commemorates Fritz London, a distinguished Duke faculty member known for his pioneering contributions to theoretical chemistry, physics, and the philosophy of science. It is presented every three years on the opening day of the International Conference on Low Temperature Physics. In 2025, the prizes will be awarded during the LT-30, taking place on August 7-13.
Fritz London, born in 1900 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), was an internationally recognized theorist whose career was disrupted by the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933. After fleeing Germany, he worked in England and France before immigrating to the United States in 1939, where he joined Duke University and later became the James B. Duke Professor of Physics and Chemistry. To honor his legacy, Duke hosts an annual endowed Fritz London Memorial Lecture, featuring distinguished physicists and chemists.
Professor Adiel (Ady) Stern is awarded the 2025 Simon Memorial Prize for original and influential theoretical work on the Quantum Hall Effect, quantum statistics of emerging quasi-particles, topological order and decoherence in condensed matter systems at low temperatures.
Born in 1960, Stern completed a BSc in Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics at Tel-Aviv University. Remaining at Tel-Aviv as a graduate student, he carried out elegant work elucidating the role of environmental decoherence in mesoscopic systems and obtained his PhD in 1993. Stern was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows for three years, before joining the Weizmann Institute of Science as a faculty member in 1995. He remains at the Weizmann Institute today, where he has been a full professor of physics in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics since 2007. His work, exploring themes such as the impact of electron-electron interactions in low-dimensional systems and manifestations of non-Abelian quasiparticles, has significantly advanced our understanding of condensed matter systems at low temperatures. His theoretical insights, developed within a wide range of collaborations, have proved extremely fruitful, stimulating the development of new avenues of both experimental and theoretical investigation. Stern is also an accomplished and enthusiastic communicator of science to a broad range of audiences. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Academy of Science and Humanities (Israel).
The prize presentation will take place on the opening day of the 30th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics.
The Simon Memorial Prize, established in 1957, commemorates the outstanding contributions to science of Sir Francis Simon. It is awarded for distinguished work in experimental or theoretical low temperature physics. For further details see https://www.iop.org/physics-community/special-interest-groups/low-temperature-group/simon-memorial-prize
The Simon Memorial Prize is supported financially by Oxford Instruments and administered by the Low Temperature Group of the Institute of Physics
Olli V. Lounasmaa Memorial Prize awarded to Prof. Andrew Cleland
Prof. Cleland’s work with micromechanical devices and qubits landed the foremost Finnish low-temperature physics prize.
llustration: Ville Heirola/Aalto University.
The Olli V. Lounasmaa Memorial Prize is awarded every three years to a scientist with outstanding contributions to low temperature physics and related fields.
This year the prize goes to Professor Andrew Cleland from the University of Chicago for his pioneering research into micromechanical devices and superconducting qubits with applications for quantum information and quantum sensing.
Prof. Cleland has made several prominent contributions to the low-temperature study of quantum phenomena. His achievements include demonstrating the preparation of Fock states and arbitrary photon superposition states in superconducting resonators, early work in modern nanomechanical devices, and being one of the first to integrate nano- and micromechanical devices with qubits.
In 2010, he achieved what Science magazine dubbed the “Breakthrough of the Year” by being the first to observe and prepare the quantum ground state and nonclassical states in a moving object.
Prof. Cleland earned his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and served on the UC Santa Barbara faculty from 1997 to 2014. Since then, he has been a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.
Beyond scientific merit, Prof. Cleland’s impact is felt across the low-temperature community. He served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the European Microkelvin Platform and the Finnish Center of Excellence in Low Temperature Quantum Phenomena and Devices. He is a former chair of the Division of Quantum Information of APS and a fellow of both the APS and the AAAS.
The Olli V. Lounasmaa Prize bears the name of the founder of the Low Temperature Laboratory. Professor Lounasmaa started the Lab in 1965 at the Helsinki University of Technology, which has since morphed to Aalto University. The Low Temperature Laboratory is a globally significant research infrastructure for low-temperature physics. As part of OtaNano, Finland’s national research infrastructure for nano-, micro- and quantum technologies, its facilities are available for use by researchers, students and companies.
The Olli V. Lounasmaa Prize Fund receives endowment from Bluefors, a 2008 spin-off company from the Low Temperature Laboratory. The 2025 prize is presented at the 30th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics (LT30) in Bilbao, Spain in August.
Dr. Bayan Karimi:
Aalto University/ University of Chicago
“For her seminal contributions to thermodynamics of quantum superconducting systems and for her quantum thermal transport experiments on them”.
Bayan Karimi works currently as a Marie Curie global post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in 2022 at Aalto University in Finland on circuit quantum thermodynamics experiments and theory. Her work focuses on understanding open quantum systems on a chip, formed of superconducting quantum circuits at mK temperatures combined with mesoscopic heat baths. Her particular discoveries include observation of temperature fluctuations in metallic absorbers, a novel type of a tunnel junction thermometer, and models for quantum refrigerators and single-photon detectors. Most recently she observed Josephson radiation by an on-chip bolometer. Her current interests are on how thermal fluctuations can be harnessed in cooling and on thermalization and relaxation of isolated quantum systems.
Dr. Shuqiu Wang:
University of Bristol
“For her spectroscopic visualisation of topological superconductivity in UTe₂”.
Dr. Shuqiu Wang is currently an assistant professor at the University of Bristol. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, followed by postdoctoral research at Oxford and Cornell Universities. Dr. Wang has been developing innovative scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) instruments and techniques for investigating quantum matter. She has studied topological superconductivity, particularly in the spin-triplet superconductor UTe₂. Her work has advanced the spectroscopic imaging and theoretical modelling of the topological surface bands. She made critical contributions to the discovery of a topological spin-triplet pair density wave. She developed a quantitative theoretic model for Andreev tunnelling, which led to the creation of scanned Andreev tunnelling microscopy. Dr. Wang played a key role in quantifying the topological surface band in UTe₂ using quasiparticle interference, providing compelling evidence for its status as an intrinsic topological superconductor. Beyond this, her work in cuprate high-temperature superconductors has led to discoveries of novel quantum phases, including orbital ordering.
Dr. Anasua Chatterjee:
Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft
“For her pioneering work on the scaling and operation of solid-state qubit implementations for quantum information, comprising some of the first two-dimensional arrays of spin qubits, as well as novel and hybrid qubit implementations”.
Anasua Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor at QuTech and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft. She is an experimental physicist, working at the intersection of quantum information and condensed matter physics. Anasua received her AB undergraduate degree from Princeton University, studying topological insulator nanostructures and their interactions with a superconductor, followed by her PhD at University College London, working on a silicon spin qubits and a hybrid silicon quantum dot-dopant qubit. During this period, she had a visiting position at the University of Cambridge and Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory. She was an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow at the Center for Quantum Devices within the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, working on semiconductor spin qubit arrays hosted in quantum dots, with a particular focus on the fabrication, scaling, tuning, and operation of small-scale quantum processors. She started her own group in 2020 as Assistant and later Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, and her group uses advanced algorithms, including machine learning techniques, to automate the operation of semiconductor qubits and to realize complex feedback-enabled circuits. She also focuses on coupling superconductors to semiconducting quantum dots, particularly in germanium heterostructures, to create coherent, functional superconductor-semiconductor circuits.
