Thomas W. EbbesenThomas W. Ebbesen is a Norwegian physi-cal chemist who has done research in nanoscience around the world. He studied in the US, obtaining his bachelor at Ober-lin College in Ohio, before moving to France, where he obtained his PhD at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in the early 1980s. He then moved back to the US to work at the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory, where he spent several years doing research in photo-physical chemistry.

His contribution to nanoscience began in 1988 when he moved to NEC in Tsukuba, Japan. He started working on the synthesis and on the properties of fullerenes, in particular, superconductivity, before drift-ing his attention towards carbon nano-tubes. In 1992, working in collaboration with Pulickel Ajayan he discovered an easy way to produce carbon nanotubes in large quantities. He went on to study the

mechanical and electronic properties of single nanotubes.

He unexpectedly observed light propag-tion through holes much smaller than the light wavelength. The phenomenon was explained by the interaction of light with electron waves at the metal surfaces (plas-mons), and published in 1998, just before Ebbesen returned to France.

Since 1999, Ebbesen has worked at the Institut de Science et Ingénierie Supra-moléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. His research interest still focuses on the prop-erties of plasmonic nanostructures and the interactions between plasmons and mol-ecules. He has received several awards for his contribution to nanoscience, including the Agilent Europhysics Prize in 2001 for his work on nanotubes, the France Tele-com Prize of the French Academy of Sci-ences in 2005 and the Quantum Electronics and Optics prize of the Euro-pean Physical Society in 2009. He is also a member of the Institut Universitaire de France, the Norwegian Academy of Sci-ence and Letters, the French Academy of Science and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.

Stefan W. HellStefan W. Hell is a German physicist, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Ger-many. Born in Romania, he did his under-graduate and postgraduate studies in Heidelberg, where he received his doctor-ate in 1990. It was during his postgradu-ate project with Siegfried Hunklinger that he became interested in ways to improve the resolution of confocal and fluores-cence microscopy, and this became the focus of his research activity in the follow-ing years.

From 1991 to 1993 he stayed in Heidel-berg to work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. There, he developed the fundamentals of 4Pi-microscopy, which allows improving the axial resolu-tion of a confocal microscope.

Towards the end of 1993 he moved to Turku, in Finland, where he led his own

Photo: © Eirik Furu Baardsen Photo: © Bernd Schuller/Wikimedia Commons

B I O G R A P H Y N A N O S C I E N C E 2 0 1 4Thomas W. Ebbesen, Stefan W. Hell, Sir John B. Pendry

research group in the Department of Medical Physics. During this period, he proposed stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, which would later break the 200 nm barrier in resolution established by Ernst Abbe over a century before.

In 1997 he went back to Germany, this time in Göttingen at the Max Plank Insti-tute for Biophysical Chemistry, where he established the Nanophotonics depart-ment, and where he became a director in 2002. In Göttingen he further developed STED microscopy and focused on other microscopy techniques derived from it. His interests are still in improving micros-copy techniques and in applying them to study biological systems. For his pioneer-ing work on microscopy he has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Prize of the International Commission in Optics in 2000, the Otto-Hahn-Prize in 2009, the Gothenburg Lise-Meitner Prize and the Körber European Science Award in 2011.

Sir John B. Pendry

John B. Pendry is the Chair in theoretical solid-state physics at Imperial College London, a position that he has held since 1981. A student of the University of Cam-bridge, he started his research career with a PhD in Physics in 1969, when he became a fellow of Downing College. He left his native England for a research posi-tion at Bell Labs in 1972-73. He returned to Cambridge, before joining the Dares-bury Laboratory in 1975, and eventually Imperial College London, where he has served as head of the Physics Department and as Principal for the Faculty of Physical Sciences.

His early research interests focused on the electronic properties of surfaces. He devel-oped theories that enabled the practical use of techniques for the study of the properties of surfaces, such as low energy electron diffraction and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. In 1992,

Pendry started the study of the interaction of light and matter that would lead to the design of ‘metamaterials’ with negative refractive index. In 2000, he then pre-dicted that such metamaterials can focus light with unlimited resolution, proposing the concept of a ‘perfect lens’.

Almost as a joke, in the early 2000’s Pendry proposed the idea of an ‘invisibility cloak’ that would hide objects from elec-tromagnetic radiation. The proposal was taken more seriously than he thought, and led to experimental realisations of such cloaking at microwave or visible wavelengths.

Pendry has won several awards, including the Dirac Medal in 1996, the Royal Medal in 2006, the UNESCO Niels Bohr gold medal in 2009 and the Isaac Newton Medal in 2013. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of the Insti-tute of Physics in 1984, and in 2004 was knighted in the British Honours for his services to science. In 2013, Pendry was made Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and LettersDrammensveien 78, 0271 Oslo, NorwayPhone +47 22 12 10 90Fax +47 22 12 10 99www.dnva.no

See also:

The Kavli Prizewww.kavliprize.no

The Kavli Foundationwww.kavlifoundation.org

Photo: © Mike Finn-Kelcey / Imperial College London