Festive award ceremony at the Planetarium

10 November 2022

Photo: Joachim Herz Stiftung/Claudia Höhne

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. Sabine Kunst, Chairwoman of the Board of the Joachim Herz Foundation (left), Prof. Dr. Nicola Spaldin, 2022 award winner, and Katharina Fegebank, 2nd Mayor and Senator for Science of Hamburg.

British scientist Nicola Spaldin received the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics yesterday. At the Planetarium Hamburg, the materials researcher from ETH Zurich was honored for her outstanding work, which led to the development of a new class of materials - so-called multiferroics. These could enable forward-looking applications in microelectronics, such as the construction of ultra-fast data storage devices or highly sensitive sensors.

Read more about Nicola Spalding's research and the prize ceremony in German.

The Joachim Herz Foundation has been awarding the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics since 2010 together with the Wolfgang Pauli Centre of DESY and Universität Hamburg, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY and the two Clusters of Excellence at Universität Hamburg: "CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter" and "Quantum Universe". The prize of 137,036 euros for outstanding research achievements in theoretical physics is one of the highest endowed awards for physics in Germany. The prize sum is an allusion to Sommerfeld's fine structure constant, which plays an important role in theoretical physics.