The ninth 2009 Arthur H. Compton Award was presented by the Department of Energy's Advanced Photon Source (APS) and the APS Users Organization jointly to Simon Mochrie (Yale University, New Haven, U.S.), Mark Sutton (McGill University in Montreal, Canada), and Gerhard Grübel from DESY for their pioneering efforts in X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), which exploits the coherent properties of synchrotron X-rays to study the slow dynamics of condensed matter at short length scales.
Gerhard Grübel brought the XPCS technique to Europe, leading the development at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, and pioneered many innovative applications of XPCS. He is now a senior scientist at HASYLAB at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, where he is involved in the development of coherence based techniques for free-electron laser sources.
Together with his group Gerhard Grübel work primarily on the bulk and surface dynamic properties of complex fluids and more recently on glassy and magnetic systems. His work on colloidal silica suspensions [e.g. G. Grübel at al. ,J. Appl. Cryst. 33, 424 (2000)] illustrated the strength of XPCS in combination with small-angle scattering for the quantitative characterization of colloidal fluids. It motivated a series of subsequent studies challenging, in particular, our knowledge of the direct and indirect hydrodynamic interactions in concentrated soft-sphere fluids.
About the prize:
Arthur H. Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for discovering and explaining changes in X-ray wavelengths resulting from X-ray collisions with electrons, the so-called Compton effect. This important discovery in 1922 confirmed the dual nature (wave and particle) of electromagnetic radiation.
Previous award recipients include Nikolai Vinokurov and Klaus Halbach (1995); Philip M. Platzman and Peter Eisenberger (1997); Donald H. Bilderback, Andreas K. Freund, Gordon S. Knapp, and Dennis M. Mills (1998); Sunil K. Sinha (2000); Wayne A. Hendrickson (2001); Martin Blume, L. Doon Gibbs, Denis McWhan, and Kazumichi Namikawa (2003); Günter Schmahl and Janos Kirz (2005); and Andrzej Joachimiak and Gerold Rosenbaum (2007).
(from APS News April 2009)
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