Cedomir Petrovic, a physicist at the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has received
the Marko Jaric Award for his outstanding achievements in physics. The award
is presented each year by the Marko Jaric Foundation to preserve the memory
of the life and work of the Serbian physicist for whom it is named. Petrovic
received the award, which consists of a certificate and $3,000, on March 17,
at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.
Cedomir Petrovic
Petrovic is one of the principal investigators in Brookhaven Lab's new
Energy Frontier Research Center, one of 46 centers in the U.S. recently established
by DOE to pursue advanced scientific research on energy. At the Brookhaven center,
Petrovic and others perform research to understand the underlying nature of
superconductivity in complex materials. Unlike ordinary conductors, superconductors
carry current with zero resistance so that no energy is lost. Brookhaven researchers,
including Petrovic, seek to improve the critical properties of superconducting
materials and accelerate the search for new superconductors with the aim of
improving the capacity, efficiency, and reliability of the electric grid.
The key challenge has been to develop superconductors that operate at temperatures
that make them practical for the real world applications. Many known superconductors
must be kept extremely cold. Petrovic makes new superconductors that can be
used as models for experimental research. One of his most important achievements
has been the synthesis and characterization of cerium-cobalt-indium, a superconductor
with the highest known superconducting temperature among materials in its class.
Petrovic designed and built his own laboratory for exploratory synthesis of
new superconducting materials. In addition, he is a master at making extremely
large, high-quality crystals of superconducting and related materials for experiments,
and he holds the record for making the world's largest crystals of compounds
of ytterbium-rhodium-silicon and cerium-cobalt-indium, important for neutron-scattering
studies of these materials.
Petrovic earned a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from the University of Belgrade,
Serbia, in 1996, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in physics from Florida State University
in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He was a postdoctoral research associate at
DOE's Ames Laboratory for two years before he joined Brookhaven Lab in
2002 as an assistant physicist. He worked through the ranks to become a tenured
physicist in 2008. He is also an adjunct professor of physics at Johns Hopkins
University.