Springer Thesis Prize for Stephen Edkins

March 14, 2017

Double congratulations to Stephen Edkins from the Physics of Quantum Materials department, who has won a Springer Thesis Prize for his PhD dissertation entitled ‘Visualising the Charge and Cooper Pair Density Waves in Cuprates’.  To do the second part of this work, performed at Cornell and jointly supervised by Prof. J.C. Séamus Davis and Prof. Andy Mackenzie, Stephen co-invented a new class of scanned microscopy based on Cooper pair Josephson tunneling in which both the probe tip and the surface under study were high temperature superconductors.  The spatially modulated superconducting state, or ‘pair density wave’ that he observed is the first direct observation of something whose possibility has been discussed theoretically for half a century, so his thesis contains some landmark results.  The thesis, which is both superbly written and highly didactic, will now be published as a book by Springer, and Stephen will be one of the few graduate students in the world who can be found indexed on Amazon! 

The second reason for congratulations is Stephen’s success in winning a prestigious Karel Urbanek Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, where he will work on another form of microscopy using a micron-scale Bose Einstein atomic condensate. We wish him every success for the future.

AM / CPfS

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