Kamerlingh Onnes Prize
The Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize, established in 2000 by the organizers of the International Conference on the Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity (M2S) and sponsored by Elsevier, Publisher of Physica C – Superconductivity and its Applications, is awarded for outstanding experiments which illuminate the nature of superconductivity other than materials. The Prize consists of € 7,000 and a special framed certificate designed by Elsevier.
NOMINATIONS OPEN FOR THE HEIKE KAMERLINGH-ONNES PRIZE
Nomination Period: August 1, 2025 – December 1, 2025
The HEIKE KAMERLINGH ONNES PRIZE committee is now accepting nominations for the 2026 award. The Kamerlingh Onnes Prize, recognizing outstanding experiments which illuminate the nature of superconductivity other than materials, will be presented during the M2S-HTSC Conference in Stuttgart, Germany on July 19 – 25, 2026.
Please submit nomination packets consisting of a letter outlining the significant research of the nominee(s), a current CV, and two letters of support as one pdf document, with Kamerlingh Onnes Prize in the subject line, to koprize@bluewin.ch by the deadline of December 1, 2025. Identities of nominated candidates and nominating scientists should be kept strictly confidential. The prize committee will examine the nominations on an individual basis, including those where multiple candidates are grouped together. All nominations and nominators will be treated confidentially.
Selection Committee
Dirk van der Marel (Chair, University of Geneva)
Setsuko Tajima (Osaka University)
Laura Greene (Florida State University)
Erik van Heumen (University of Amsterdam)
Rolf Lortz (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Past Kamerlingh Onnes Prize Recipients
2022:
Bernhard Keimer, Giacomo Ghiringhelli, and Pengcheng Dai
for experiments determining spin and charge correlations in high temperature superconductors using x-ray and neutron scattering
2018:
Yuji Matsuda and Louis Taillefer
for illuminating the nature of superconductivity in unconventional superconductors
2015:
Gilbert Lonzarich
for visionary experiments concerning the emergence of superconductivity among strongly renormalized quasiparticles at the edge of magnetic order
2012:
Herbert A. Mook, TeunisvM. Klapwijk and Øystein H. Fischer
for their long-term outstanding and pioneering contributions to the experimental superconductivity research
2009:
J.C. Seamus Davis, Aharon Kapitulnik, and John Tranquada
for pioneering and seminal experiments which illuminate the nature of superconductivity in strongly correlated electron systems
2006:
N. Phuan Ong, Hidenori Takagi and Shin-ichi Uchida
for pioneering and seminal transport experiments which illuminated the unconventional nature of the metallic state of high temperature superconducting cuprates.
2003:
George Crabtree and Eli Zeldov
for pioneering and seminal experiments which elucidated the vortex phase diagram in high temperature superconductors under various conditions of disorder and anisotropy.
2000:
Zhi-Xun Shen
for elucidating the electron structure of high-temperature superconductors and other strongly interacting electron materials by angular resolved photoelectron spectroscopy.
About Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (21 September 1853 – 21 February 1926) was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. Kamerlingh Onnes measured the electrical conductivity of pure metals at very low temperatures.
On 8 April 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes found that at 4.2 K the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium suddenly vanished. He immediately realized the significance of the discovery (as became clear when his notebook was deciphered a century later). He reported that " Mercury has passed into a new state, which on account of its extraordinary electrical properties may be called the superconductive state". He published more articles about the phenomenon, initially referring to it as " supraconductivity" and, only later adopting the term "superconductivity".
Kamerlingh Onnes received widespread recognition for his work, including the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics for (in the words of the committee) "his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium".