Honors and awards

Physical Review B is celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2020. The journal emerged out of its revered parent, The Physical Review, in response to the explosive growth of specialized physics content. It has excelled in front-edge coverage of condensed matter and materials physics research. As part of the celebration, in 2020 the editors are presenting a Milestone collection of papers that have made lasting contributions to condensed matter physics. Selection of papers of such importance is not an easy task. It is inevitable that some very important work will not be featured because of the abundance of gems in the treasure trove of the largest journal for physics. The Milestones will be highlighted on the journal website and in social media throughout the year.

Illinois Physics Professor James Eckstein has been selected for the American Physical Society’s 2021 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials. This prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the science and application of new materials.

Eckstein shares the prize with two colleagues—Brookhaven National Laboratory Senior Scientist Ivan Bozovic and Cornell University Industrial Chemistry Professor Darrell G. Schlom—with whom he worked at Varian, Inc., in Palo Alto, CA, in the 1990s. There they developed atomic-layer-by-layer molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) as an effective method of growing artificially structured oxide materials in which each atomic-oxide layer can be individually specified.

The citation reads, “For pioneering the atomic-layer-by-layer synthesis of new metastable complex oxide materials, and the discovery of resulting novel phenomena.”