Prof. Angel Rubio receives Premio Rey Jaime I 2014 in the area of Basic Research

The renowned Spanish award was presented to the researcher from Hamburg by Queen Sofía of Spain during a ceremony that took place in the historic building of the silk exchange of Valencia on 25 November 2014.

Prof. Angel Rubio, director of the Theory Department of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, was honored with the Premio Rey Jaime I 2014 in the area of Basic Research. The renowned prize of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Fundación Valenciana de Estudios Avanzados (FVEA) consists of a gold medal, a certificate and 100,000 euros prize money.

The jury including 19 Nobel laureates awarded the prize to Angel Rubio for being a world-renowned theoretical physicist in the fields of nanoscience and materials science. He made seminal contributions to the electronic structure theory and its implementation to explain the properties of materials, especially those with novel nanostructures. In addition, his work provides a fundamental contribution to the design of actual devices.

Angel Rubio pioneered the development of first-principles methods for elucidating excited-state properties of materials, nanostructures and biomolecules, and their chemical and physical properties with special emphasis on bringing fundamental developments into real devices and materials of technological relevance.  He has created two new research fields in physics. The first is the creation of new structures for nanotechnology that can be used for the transmission of electromagnetic fields. The other is the creation of a new theory to explain how light is absorbed or emitted by molecular structures and solids, allowing the creation of new materials with tailored properties.

These advances have led to predictive results of unprecedented accuracy and new insights on the spectroscopic properties of numerous systems. His work transformed computational materials physics and spawned worldwide activities, in particular in the past five years. An example is the recent establishment of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF), which to a large extent was made possible by the powerful theoretical tools based on the work of Angel Rubio and his collaborators.

Since 1989, the Premios Rey Jaime I are awarded on an annual basis. In 2014, a total of six laureates were awarded in the categories Basic Research, Economics, Medical Research, Protection of Nature, New Technologies, and Entrepreneur. The Premio Rey Jaime I in Basic Research is awarded to a person whose life of work and research has contributed to the development of basic science in Spain.