Breaking news! The 2026 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize has been announced and the winner is...CU Physics Professor Yasutomo Uemura, who shares the award with fellow recipient Richard L. Greene from the University of Maryland. In awarding Professor Uemura, the five-person selection committee cited his work establishing the relation between the superfluid density and the superconducting critical temperature in a broad range of unconventional superconductors.
The Prize was established in 2000 by the organizers of the International Conference on the Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity (M2S) and is bestowed to researchers for exceptional experiments that "illuminate the nature of superconductivity other than materials." It has traditionally been awarded every three years but has not selected recipients since 2022, when three physicists shared it for their work on experiments determining spin and charge correlations in high temperature superconductors using x-ray and neutron scattering.
Professor Uemura joined the CU Physics Department as an Associate Professor in 1988. During his time with Columbia, he has received numbers honors and awards including the APS Fellowship in 1999, the Yamazaki Prize from the International Society for MuSR Spectroscopy in 2005, and the Fibonacci Prize from the RICMASS (Rome) in 2017.
The 2026 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize will formally be awarded in July at this year's M2S conference in Stuttgart, Germany.
Well done, Tomo!
