Honours abound for physicists in 2013
In the New Year’s Honours List of the United Kingdom, Professor Peter Higgs, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour, and two Fellows of the Institute of Physics were made Knights Bachelor – Professor Keith Burnett, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, and Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton. Professor Burnett has carried out many pioneering studies in quantum optics and has been recognised for his services to science and higher education. Professor Payne was recognized for his services to photonics research and its applications, including his research into the optical amplifier than now underpins long-distance fibre optics transmission networks.
Ignacio Cirac from Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics at Garching, Germany, and Peter Zoller from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, were awarded the 2013 Wolf Prize from the Wolf Foundation in Israel for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
And concerning EPS in particular, January also saw the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division award its inaugural Prize for Research into the Science of Light, a major prize of the division awarded every two years in recognition of scientific excellence in the area of electromagnetic science. The 2013 Laureate is Philip St J Russell from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, who received the prize for pioneering contributions into the physics and applications of photonic crystal fiber. His research in this field has led to revolutionary advances in frequency metrology and the development of a flexible platform for gas-phase nonlinear optics that is enabling a new generation of experiments in ultrafast pulse dynamics, ionization physics and self-similarity. The prize was awarded on 3 January 2013 at the EPS Nanometa Conference held in Seefeld, Austria.
