AIP Congratulates Kavli Prize Winners in Astrophysics, Nanosciences
Andrew Fabian and Ondrej Krivanek
WASHINGTON, May 27, 2020 -- The American Institute of Physics congratulates Andrew Fabian and Ondrej Krivanek as recipients of 2020 Kavli Prizes for their separate work in the categories of astrophysics and nanoscience, respectively.
The laureates were announced at a May 27 ceremony in Oslo, Norway, by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The awards from The Kavli Foundation recognize scientific breakthroughs and support basic research.
“Many congratulations to this year’s winners of the Kavli Prizes in astrophysics and nanoscience,” said Michael Moloney , AIP’s CEO. “Once again the Kavli Foundation, and the awards committees that selected this year’s laureates, have done our research community a service by recognizing how the application of human curiosity and cutting-edge technology can unlock the universe’s secrets at the smallest and largest scales.”
Fabian was honored in the astrophysics category “for his pioneering research and persistence in pursuing the mystery of how black holes influence their surrounding galaxies on both large and small scales.”
“We’re looking at dead objects in the universe like black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs and things, as well as vast seas of very hot gas in the universe,” Fabian said after the ceremony. “There is gas between galaxies that gets squeezed up when galaxies get clustered together, and they become very good X-ray sources. I’ve been looking at the interaction between black holes in the centers of the clusters and the cluster atmospheres, trying to understand how the energy from the black hole gets transmitted out into the surrounding gas.”
Fabian has been director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge since 2013 and served as the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2008 to 2010. He was previously awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for astrophysics by the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical Society in 2008 “for his innovative and influential work in the field of X-ray astronomy has spanned a wide range of topics, including rotation of massive black holes, the X-ray background, hot gas in rich clusters, and non-thermal emission from accretion disks.”
Krivanek received the prize in nanoscience for improving the resolution of electron microscopes. His work focused on dealing with fixing spherical aberrations in the electron microscope’s lenses to image and analyze materials at the atomic level.
“There are many situations where a single atom could make a difference,” Krivanek said. “In all the wonderful worlds of electronics … if you get one atom in the wrong place at that interface between the metal and the oxide, it will destroy the properties of the transistor, and your iPhone won’t work.”
Krivanek is a Fellow of the American Physics Society and currently the president of Nion Company and an affiliate professor at Arizona State University. He shared the neuroscience prize with three others, Harald Rose, Maximilian Hader and Knut Urban, who independently found other methods to correct the aberrations.
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