UK materials scientist wins prestigious Hamburg Prize
14 Nov 2022
The British scientist Nicola Spaldin has won the prestigious Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics for her work on the development of multiferroic materials.
Presented for outstanding research achievements in theoretical physics, it is one of Germany’s highest endowed awards in the field and worth €137,000.
Declaring the award choice, Chair of the Joachim Herz Foundation Sabine Kunst said: “With her research, Nicola Spaldin finds herself at the interface between theoretical physics, chemistry and materials research.
She sets an example for interdisciplinary and international collaboration.”
Spaldin, who now heads a research group at ETH Zurich, is credited with laying the foundations for researching multiferroics – a new class of materials – in a scientific article written in 2000.
Multiferroics are defined as materials that can be both permanently magnetised and electrically polarised. While those properties almost never co-exist in nature, Spaldin theorised how customised crystals that are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric could be produced, a process realised three years later.
Multiferroics enable construction of ultra-fast data repositories and supersensitive sensors. In the case of computers, they have the potential to remove the need to physically separate the electrical processing of information in a processor and their magnetic storage on hard drives. This allow higher processing power and lower power consumption.
