5 August 2022

Dmitri Efetov Receives the International Early Career Scientist Prize

For his "observation of novel insulating, superconducting and topological many-body ground states in bilayer magic-angle twisted graphene" - according to the laudation - Professor Dmitri Efetov has been awarded the Early Career Scientist Prize in Semiconductor Physics by IUPAP. With this award, the International Union for Pure and Applied Sciences recognizes early career physicists for their scientific contributions in the physics research fields represented by IUPAP.

"I am very honored that the Early Career Scientist Prize recognizes research at the beginning of my career, and I am looking forward to discoveries in the next career stage here in Munich," said Dmitri Efetov, who has held the chair of Experimental Solid State Physics at LMU since last August. The physicist conducts research on graphene - a modification of the chemical element carbon. This is an extremely flat nanomaterial that is only one atomic layer thick. This means it is present in the plane, but virtually absent in the height. In one layer of graphene, electrons become massless - and when two layers of graphene are twisted at a certain angle to each other, a variety of "quantum phases" are created, including graphene becoming superconducting, magnetic and topological. "Graphene really has all the qualities that are interesting in modern solid-state physics right now," Efetov says.

The internationally renowned Early Career Scientist Prize was awarded in July at the ICPS-2022 conference in Sydney, Australia. This is endowed with a monetary amount, and prize winners also receive a medal and a certificate. Candidates must have up to eight years of postdoctoral research experience without having interrupted their careers. Previous award winners include such well-known researchers as Lieven Vandersypen (TU Delft, NL), Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT, USA), and Xiaodong Xu (University of Washington, USA).