May 21 2010
Professor Gabriel Aeppli, co-director of the LCN and Quain Professor of Physics in the UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy, is one of 44 new Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2010.
The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of science and election as a Fellow is one of the highest honours than can be attained by a scientist working in the UK. The Royal Society’s citation accompanying the announcement reads:
‘Aeppli is one of the world's leading condensed matter physicists, a winner of the American Physical Society's major Oliver Buckley Prize. He identified magnets with tunable quantum fluctuations using them to study the cross-over between the classical and quantum behaviour. His work demonstrated that magnetic quantum fluctuations could not be described by otherwise successful 20th century theory. His team showed such fluctuations as particularly strong in exotic superconductors, such as high transition temperature copper oxides, providing key evidence that quantum spin fluctuations, rather than the atomic vibrations of standard theory, are at the root of exotic superconductivity.’
Professor Aeppli has been at UCL since 2002, leading the establishment of the LCN through its official opening in 2006. Previously he held positions in the USA at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and the NEC Research Laboratories in Princeton. Besides the Oliver Buckley Prize in 2005 he has also received the IUPAP Magnetism Prize and Néel Medal in 2003,and the Institute of Physics Mott Medal and Prize in 2008.