The winners of this year's Materials Design Prizes and PhD Prize have been announced.

Materials Design Graduate Research Prize

Samuel Palmer

Sam is awarded this prize for his work on modelling metamaterials. Specifically, he discovered that densely packed arrays of metallic nanoparticles can be more transparent to infrared radiation than transparent dielectric materials, such as germanium, with possible applications to optical wave guides. To achieve these insights, Sam reinterpreted the finite element method elegantly to calculate the effective refractive index of complex systems involving multiple length scales. The preprint is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08796

Materials Design Advanced Graduate Research Prize

Andrew Warwick

Andrew receives this prize for his outstanding work on domain walls in halide perovskites, a new class of materials with promising properties for solar cell applications. Combining group theory analysis with first-principles DFT calculations, Andrew suggested a new mechanism for using domain walls to enhance charge carrier separation. His work led to a recent paper in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, available here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.9b00202

Johnson Matthey PhD Prize

Gleb Siroki

Gleb is awarded the Johnson Matthey PhD Prize for his impressive work on the role of topology in plasmonics and photonics. In the first year of his PhD, Gleb developed a theory to describe the interaction of topological nanoparticles with light and published this work in Nature Communications (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12375). He then worked on topological effects in photonic crystals and demonstrated that in these systems light can propagate uni-directionally and without scattering. This research led to papers published in Physical Review Materials: https://journals.aps.org/prmaterials/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.1.024201 and Physical Review B: https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.96.041408.