Peter Johnson, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been awarded the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2011 Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics, an honor he will share with two other recipients. The prize was given for “innovation in angle-resolving photoemission spectroscopy”, which has had a profound effect on the study of strongly correlated electronic systems.
Zhi-Xun Shen of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Juan Carlos Campuzano of Argonne National Laboratory were the other two recipients of the prize.
“This was a very pleasant surprise and the fact that they awarded this prize to all three of us was also a pleasant surprise – we’ve all been very competitive for a long time,” Johnson said. “It is an honor for myself, my group, and the Laboratory to receive this recognition from the larger community.”
Johnson began his work with photoemission spectroscopy in the early 1980s as a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories. His developments over the years have provided much insight into the properties of strongly correlated electronic materials, the most common example being cuprate superconductors.
Johnson is the Chair of Brookhaven’s Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department and leads the electron spectroscopy group at the lab. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.
