Frank Steglich

Frank Steglich(born 14 March 1941) is a German physicist and the founding director of theMax Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of SolidsinDresden,Germany.

Education and career

Steglich was born in Dresden and studied physics in theUniversity of Münsterand theUniversity of Göttingen,where he received his PhD underRudolf Hilsch.

Steglich discovered the firstheavy fermion superconductor,CeCu₂Si₂,while working as a research associate in Cologne, Germany in 1979.CeCu₂Si₂is the first metallic system to be discovered in which thesuperconductivityis driven by electron-electron interactions, rather than the electron-phonon interaction that is responsible for conventionalBCSsuperconductivity. The discovery of this material revolutionized research into superconductivity, establishing the reality of electronically mediated superconductivity and foreshadowing the discovery of a wide range of heavy electron superconductors, and the subsequent discovery of electronically mediated pairing in cuprateshigh temperature superconductors.The first published report of the phenomenon occurred in 1979,by which time Steglich had taken up a faculty position at the University of Darmstadt, and confirmed the existence of bulk superconductivity through the measurement of the specific heat anomaly at the transition temperature of T_c=0.5K.

Honors and awards

Steglich won theHewlett-Packard Europhysics Prizeand theGay-Lussac-Humboldt Prizein 1989, theAmerican Physical SocietyInternational Prize for New Materials in 1990, theIUPAPMagnetism Award in 2000, theStern-GerlachMedal in 2004, theBernd T. Matthias Prizefor Superconducting Materials in 2006 and theFritz London Memorial Prizein 2020. Steglich received theGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prizeby theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaftin 1986 and a number of other recognitions. He has been the Vice President of theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(German Research Foundation).

Steglich is member of several Academies of Sciences and Fellow of the American Physical Society. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Augsburg, Cologne and Frankfurt/Main as well Kraków (Poland). Since 2012 he is distinguished visiting professor at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing) and at Zhe gian g University, Hangzhou (China). At the latter school he became founding director of the Center for Correlated Matter (CCM) in 2012.

External links

• Frank Steglichpublications indexed byGoogle Scholar
• MPI CPfS page