The European Physical Society (EPS) has awarded the 2005 Agilent Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Condensed Matter Physics to David Awschalom, UCSB professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering.

He and two others are being honored for their investigations of magnetic semiconductors and spin coherence in the solid state, which paved the way for the emergence of spin electronics, or spintronics.

The Europhysics Prize—it comes with a cash award of around $42,400—is one of the most prestigious physics prizes presented in Europe. Created in 1968, the EPS represents over 80,000 members and physicists through its 38 national member societies.

At UCSB, where he has been a faculty member since 1991, Awschalom is director of the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation, and is associate scientific director of the California Nanosystems Institute.

He and his research group have pioneered new experimental techniques that made possible the discovery of long-lived electron spin lifetimes and coherence in semiconductors and nanostructures. They recently demonstrated all-electrical generation and manipulation of both electron and nuclear spins in prototype solid-state devices.

Explains Martin Moskovits, dean of UCSB’s Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences Division, “David and his coworkers are pioneer founders of a new branch of physics, dubbed spintronics, which exploits a previously underused property—a kind of fundamental magnetism—of the electron.”

This work opens the door to new opportunities, including the development of fundamentally new systems for high density storage, ultrafast information processing, and secure communication.

Also awarded the 2005 Agilent Europhysics Prize are Tomasz Dietl of the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland, and Hideo Ohno, of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Japan.

The UCSB spintronics center that Awschalom heads is affiliated with the California Nanosystems Institute, one of the four California Institutes for Science and Innovation established in 2000 and supported by the state and private industry. The nanosystems institute is a joint project of UC Santa Barbara and UCLA.

Awschalom’s honors include the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, the Outstanding Investigator Prize from the Materials Research Society, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Magnetism Prize, and the 2005 Oliver E. Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society.

Agilent has sponsored the Europhysics Prize for the past 30 years (as Hewlett-Packard until 1999), based on the belief that fundamental advances in science have the potential to revolutionize the way people live and work.