The physicist Mads Christof Weber has won the "Rolf Tarrach Prize 2017” for his outstanding doctoral thesis in physics and material science.

The award for the best doctoral thesis in Luxembourg comes with a prize money of €10,000 and is bestowed by the "Amis de l'Université". Mads Weber received the prize at a ceremony chaired by Erna Hennicot-Schoepges, president of the Amis, on Tuesday 11 July 2017 at the Chamber of Commerce of Luxembourg.

It is the first time this prestigious prize is awarded to a LIST PhD researcher. Mads Weber worked on his PhD entitled “Electronic and structural properties of bismuth and rare-earth ferrites” from 2013 to 2016 at LIST and was enrolled at the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication of the University of Luxembourg.

For his work, supervised by MRT Director and FNR PEARL Chair Prof. Jens Kreisel, Mads Weber concentrated on so-called multifunctional materials, which present several functional properties that are often coupled. “Multifunctional materials have many potential applications in areas such as microelectronics, sensor technology, and medical technology. They could be used to engineer components that can perform several tasks in parallel, such as a single computer chip that at the same time stores and processes data,” the researcher explained. In order to better understand the underlying physical phenomena, he applied a new approach to study interactions between light and matter, and namely the influence of magnetism on the atomic structure.

The 31-year-old Weber, who in March 2017 started to work as post-doctoral researcher at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland ws very pleased to receive the award. “I feel deeply honoured to receive the “Rolf-Tarrach-Prize”. The prize is the highest possible recognition of the value of scientific outcome of my thesis and my competences as researcher. Having moved from Luxembourg, the prize affirms my feeling as a representative of the young researcher generation of Luxembourg. I am proud to be part of this new generation of researchers and scientists who received their education in Luxembourg,” he said.

LIST warmly congratulated Mads Weber for his achievement. The prize also stands as a testimony of the excellent research done at LIST.