Max Auwärter Preis
The MAX AUWÄRTER AWARD for students and young researchers is offered bi-annually by the Max Auwärter Foundation in Balzers, Principality of Liechtenstein. It is open to university and research institution-based scientists of up to 35 years of age who have published significant work in the fields of surface physics, surface chemistry, or organic and inorganic thin films. In the case of a multi-author publication, the significant role of the applicant should be emphasized in a separate statement. The award includes a certificate and a prize of EUR 10.000.—
The Prize will be awarded at the annual meeting of the Austrian Physical Society.
Dr. Shantanu Mishra
Winner 2024
Shantanu Mishra’s research centres around bottom-up synthesis of carbon-based nanostructures and investigation of their electronic properties by means of scanning probe techniques. Through combining rational design principles and on-surface chemistry, he showed the generation of magnetism in purely organic molecules, and further demonstrated outstanding examples of many-body phenomena in individual molecules and molecular nanostructures on surfaces, such as magnetic bistability in polycyclic conjugated hydrocarbons, and emergence of fractional excitations and the Haldane phase (one of the cornerstone models of quantum magnetism) in molecular quantum spin chains. The research has been instrumental in demonstrating that the rational fabrication of organic molecular nanostructures on surfaces, when combined with the atomic resolution capabilities of scanning probe microscopy, constitutes a fertile platform to investigate low-dimensional magnetism and complex many-body physics at the atomic scale.
