EPS Edison-Volta 2018 Prize for Alain Brillet
The European Physical Society (EPS), the Fondazione Alessandro Volta and Edison S.p.A. have awarded the 2018 European Physical Society Edison Volta Prize to:
- Alain Brillet (Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, CNRS, Université de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France)
- Karsten Danzmann (Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik and Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany)
- Adalberto Giazotto † (INFN, Pisa, Italy) and
- Jim Hough (University of Glasgow, UK)
“for the development, in their respective countries, of key technologies and innovative experimental solutions, that enabled the advanced interferometric gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo to detect the first gravitational wave signals from mergers of Black Holes and of Neutron Stars.”
The EPS Edison Volta Prize promotes excellence in research and is given in recognition of outstanding research and achievements in physics. The Prize is given biennially to individuals or groups of up to three people. The laureates receive a medal, which is a faithful reproduction of the Medaglia Premio dell’ Associazione per l’Incremento del Commercio in Como: a portrait of Alessandro Volta together with the saying: Alexandro Voltae Novocomensi, i.e. (dedicated) to Alessandro Volta from Novum Comum, which was the old name given to the city of Como by Julius Caesar.
The Prize was established in 2011 and was awarded for the first time in 2012 to R. D. Heuer, S. Bertolucci and S. Myers from CERN, Geneva and in 2014 to J.-M. Raimond from the Laboratory Kastler Brossel at the Collège de France, Paris. It was also given to three principal scientific leaders of the ESA’s Max Planck Mission in 2015 in the frame of the International Year of Light 2015: N. Mandolesi, University of Ferrara, J.-L. Puget, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris Sud & CNRS, and J. Tauber, Directorate of Science and Robotic ESA (NL).