The 2008 ICTP Prize in honour of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes has been awarded to Professor Abhishek Dhar, Theoretical Physics Group, Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India and Professor Zhong Fang, Center for Quantum Simulation Sciences, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
Abhishek Dhar is being honoured for "his outstanding contributions to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of transport and fluctuation phenomena, classical as well as quantum mechanical. His exact and insightful results have clarified subtle issues, and corrected several misconceptions, specially about heat conduction."
Zhong Fang is being recognized for "his theoretical and computational work on the origin of anomalous Hall effect, and for his significant contributions to the understanding of spin and orbital physics in transition metal oxides".
The 2008 ICTP Prize is named after the French physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1991. De Gennes, who died in 2007, was one of the most influential theoretical physicists of his time. His work spanned a wide variety of subjects in condensed matter theory and statistical physics, and has pushed forward the frontiers of phenomena such as liquid crystals and polymer physics.
The date of the awards ceremony will be announced later.