ITHACA, N.Y. -- J.C. Seamus Davis, Cornell professor of physics, will share in the 2005 Fritz London Memorial Prize, considered the highest award in the field of low-temperature physics. Since the prize was inaugurated in 1957, nine winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.

Davis, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2002, conducts research into the behavior of superconductors and superfluids at temperatures close to absolute zero in order to learn more about the fundamental physics of matter.

The London prize will be awarded at the International conference on Low Temperature Physics in Orlando, Florida in August. The prize cites Davis for "studies of superfluid helium-3 weak-link arrays revealing a rich variety of phenomena including quantum interference and for the invention and development of spectroscopic imaging STM techniques and their application in studies of individual impurity/dopant atom effects, vortex-core electronic structure, quasiparticle interference effects and alternative ordered states in the cuprate superconductors."

The first part of the citation refers to the study of superfluids like liquid helium-3 flowing in channels only a few nanometers across at temperatures near absolute zero, where Davis has discovered unusual quantum effects. These include the formation of Josephson junctions that are extremely sensitive detectors of rotational movement, forming a "quantum gyroscope" so sensitive that it can detect the rotation of the Earth.

The second part refers to work he has done using an improved scanning tunneling microscope (STM) of his own design that can show the location of clouds of electrons around atoms. Most recently this has allowed him to discover that electrons in a high-temperature superconductor arrange themselves in a structure resembling a crystal lattice. (Read the August 26, 2004, issueof the Cornell Chronicle.)

Davis shares the prize with Richard E. Packard at the University of California-Berkeley, with whom he collaborated on the superfluid research, and Sebastien Balibar at the Ecole Normal Superieure, Paris, France.

The London prize, given once every three years, is named for Fritz London, a professor at Duke University who was the first to recognize the deep connection between superconductivity, superfluidity and the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation. It was initially endowed by John Bardeen, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1972 for what is known as the BCS theory explaining superconductivity.

Previous winners of the London prize include John D. Reppy, the John L. Wetherill Professor of Physics at Cornell, who shared the prize in 1981.