Max Born Prize 2015 goes to Andrea Cavalleri

German-British award for Prof. Dr. Andrea Cavalleri, the Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD).

For his "time-resolved measurements of photoinduced phase transitions in correlated electronic materials" Prof. Dr. Andrea Cavalleri, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), is awarded the prestigious Max Born Prize. The prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) and the British Institute of Physics (IOP) commemorates the work of the physicist Max Born. Since 1973, the two organizations jointly award the annual prize to a British and a German researcher in alternation. A the DPG’s spring meeting next year, Prof. Dr. Andrea Cavalleri will be given 3,000 euro prize money, the Max-Born-commemorative medal and the certificate with the dedication "For the most valuable and recent scientific contributions to physics".

In his research Andrea Cavalleri combines condensed matter physics with time-resolved optical spectroscopy and x-ray science. His work focusses on the light-driven control of the closely-related electrical, magnetic and structural properties of strongly correlated electronic systems. These materials exhibit a variety of intriguing effects such as metal-insulator transitions or high-temperature superconductivity. Cavalleri uses femtosecond x-ray pulses to gain new insight into the dynamics of phase transitions in these systems on their elementary time scale.

Andrea Cavalleri studied physics in Italy. In 1998, he received his PhD at the University of Essen. After working at the University of California San Diego and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Oxford in 2005. In 2008, he also became head of a research group of the Max Planck Society at the University of Hamburg. Since 2013 he is director of the new Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg.