News

CERIC funded research won Frontiers of Science Award

Location
Trieste

A paper published in 2019 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, the result of a research project partially financed by CERIC, has received the 2023 ICBS Frontiers of Science Award in the Theoretical Physics category, Condensed Matter subcategory.

The International Congress for Basic Science, which decided the papers to be awarded, honors top studies from the past five years which are both scientifically excellent and of outstanding scholarly value: in fact, the main goal of Frontiers of Science Award is “to encourage young scholars to look to the frontiers of basic science, set goals to obtain breakthrough results as early as possible, and contribute wisdom and energy to humankind’s study of the mysteries of the natural world”. In particular, for 2023, scientific works in both basic and applied research have been chosen in 34 areas of the three basic science fields: mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer/information sciences.

The article of Otrokov and colleagues, that was also selected in 2019 as a CERIC-ERIC Highlight, has been awarded “for theoretically predicting and experimentally confirming the first-ever three-dimensional antiferromagnetic topological insulator compound, manganese bismuth telluride”. As highlighted by the Award committee, “this discovery opens up possibilities for significant advancements in novel electronics”, thus creating a bridge between basic scientific research and applications in industry.