Andrea Cavalleri to be awarded the Stern-Gerlach Medal

Andrea Cavalleri, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), will be awarded the Stern-Gerlach-Medal of the German Physical Society (DPG). He receives the Prize in recognition of his “pioneering work in light-based control of quantum materials, with which he made groundbreaking contributions to controlling emergent phenomena in solid-state physics”.

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Andrea Cavalleri © MPSD

At the MPSD, Andrea Cavalleri leads the Condensed Matter Dynamics Department. In the past two decades, his work has led to breakthroughs in the light-control of the properties of quantum materials, ranging from superconductivity, to magnetism, ferroelectricity, topological transport and recently chirality and other exotic phases of matter. He has also been a major innovator in new experimental methods, having contributed to the development of ultrafast X-ray sources and their applications to condensed matter.

For his achievements, Andrea Cavalleri has already been honored with the 2015 Max Born Medal, a joint prize of the Institute of Physics in the U.K. and the German Physical Society (DPG), as well as the 2018 Frank Isakson Prize of the American Physical Society and the EPS Europhysics Prize 2024.

Andrea Cavalleri is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, Founding Director of the MPSD and a Co-Director of the Max Planck - New York Center for Non-Equilibrium Quantum Phenomena. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the European Academy of Sciences. He is also a Member of the Academia Europaea.

The Stern-Gerlach Medal is the most prestigious award conferred by the DPG for outstanding achievements in the field of experimental physics. The Stern-Gerlach Medal was established as a prize by the DPG in 1986 and was converted into a medal in 1992. Andrea Cavalleri is the third Max Planck Director in a row being awarded this prestigious prize, with the laureates 2024 Immanuel Bloch and 2025 Klaus Blaum.

The Prize will be presented during a ceremony at the DPG Spring Meeting of the Matter and Cosmos Section 2026 in Erlangen at the 17th of March 2026.