Celebrations in Oslo as Sir John Pendry receives million dollar Kavli Prize

His Majesty King Harald of Norway will present the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience to Sir John Pendry at an award ceremony being held today in Oslo.

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..

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.”

Speaking from Oslo on the eve of the ceremony, Imperial’s Provost Professor James Stirling said:

“As I look out of my hotel window, I can see the main street lined with Kavli Prize Week banners. There is a wonderful sense of celebration in the Oslo air this week, with a full programme of events to celebrate some of the world’s greatest scientists. I am honoured to be invited here by John, to support him alongside his family and some of his longstanding collaborators.

Today we have heard amazing talks from all the prize winners – John spoke about his pioneering work on metamaterials, which has led to him sharing this year’s nanoscience prize, and I also learnt a lot from the other talks on cosmology and neuroscience.

Tomorrow we are off to the Awards Ceremony in the Oslo Concert Hall when his Majesty King Harald will present the prizes before a banquet in the City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in December each year. It is exciting to see the important work of an Imperial researcher up there with the very best!”

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.

When the awards were announced in May of this year, 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”.