Chinese scientist wins international condensed matter physics award

BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientist Xue Qikun has won the 2024 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize, an international award that recognizes outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics, according to the American Physical Society.

Xue, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ashvin Vishwanath, a professor at Harvard University, won the award together for their pioneering theoretical and experimental studies on the collective electronic properties of materials that reflect topological aspects of their band structure.

The award is acknowledged as the highest international honor in the field of condensed matter physics. As China's first winner of the award, Xue is highly regarded by the international physics community for his contributions to the field of topological insulators and his work on the quantum anomalous Hall effect.

He is also a professor at Tsinghua University and president of the Southern University of Science and Technology. He and his team were the first to experimentally observe the quantum anomalous Hall effect in 2012, and they published their findings in the journal Science in 2013.