Professor Sir John Pendry, known for his work on the 'invisibility cloak' and the perfect lens, has been awarded the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience.

An eminent theoretical physicist, Professor Sir John Pendry FRS receives the prize in honour of his contributions to nano-optics, which explores how light behaves on a scale of one billionth of a metre, and to the field of metamaterials - manmade materials with unusual properties that can be manipulated and used for potentially transformative impacts.

The Kavli Prize honours scientists for outstanding research in the fields of nanoscience, astrophysics and neuroscience. Sir John shares the one million dollar Nanoscience Prize with Thomas Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg and Professor Stefan Hell from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. The winners will receive their awards from the King of Norway at an award ceremony in Oslo this September.

Professor Sir John Pendry FRS said: "I am delighted and greatly honoured to receive the Kavli Prize. I’m also delighted for my joint award winners, Thomas Ebbesen and Stefan Hell who are also friends of mine. It is just wonderful that this Prize is rewarding optics research more than 150 years after Maxwell’s equations when the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first set out his equations governing how light moves.”

Professor Pendry has been carrying out research at Imperial’s Physics Blackett Laboratory for over 30 years, having started as Professor of Theoretical Solid State Physics in 1981.

His research has generated a new series of metamaterials, which owe more to their physical structure than their chemical composition, and display unusual properties such as negative refractive index.

He shares this year’s Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his pioneering research that generated the revolutionary theory of the perfect lens. By bending light in dramatically different ways, this research challenged the conventional laws of physics to generate better resolutions than conventional optic lenses. The theory may help image objects smaller than a wavelength of light for the first time.

His theoretical work has also contributed to the first working prototype of a cloaking device that makes an object invisible to radar waves. The device makes radar waves flow smoothly around an object instead of striking and reflecting off it, giving the illusion of transparency.

On hearing the announcement, Sir Keith O’Nions, President of Imperial College London, said: “Imperial and the whole British scientific community will be celebrating this well-deserved honour.

“This is a prime example of how investment in high-quality research pays dividends. Future generations of physicists and other researchers will benefit from the scientific foundations laid by John Pendry and his peers.

“John Pendry – the College’s first ever recipient of the Kavli Prize – is one of the great Imperial scientists of all time.” 

Professor Arne Brataas, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and chairman of the Kavli Nanoscience Prize Committee, said: “Thomas W. Ebbesen, Stefan W. Hell, and John B. Pendry have independently advanced our ability to ‘see’ nano-scale objects using visible light. They have greatly advanced our understanding of nano-optics and the applications of their insights promise to have an enduring benefit to a wide range of fields from physics and chemistry to the biological and biomedical sciences”.