The Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation Prize in Physics of 20.000 euros was awarded to Professor Jukka Pekola at the Department of Engineering Physics at Aalto University on April 29 at the annual celebration of the Finnish Society of Science and Letters.
Pekola is a researcher in experimental low-temperature physics and one of the absolute international leaders in his field. His research focuses on the thermodynamics of nanostructures and the heat transfer properties of nanostructures.
Early in his career, he invented a temperature sensor based on superconducting transitions (Physical Review Letters 73, 2903 (1994)). More recently, he has experimentally demonstrated that the so-called Maxwell demon can be used for information-based cooling at the nanoscale (Physical Review Letters 115, 260602 (2015)). A third breakthrough example is an experiment demonstrating photon-based heat conduction in a single modality (Nature 444, 187 (2014)).
Pekola has been an Academy Professor from 2000-2005 and 2014-2018. He holds a PhD from the Helsinki University of Technology and was a professor of physics at the University of Jyväskylä in the 1990s. In Jyväskylä, he played a key role in the establishment of the Nanoscience Center. In the early 2000s, he moved back to the Helsinki University of Technology. Today, Pekola heads the National Quantum Technology Research Center QTF and has also co-founded InstituteQ, which coordinates Finnish research and education in quantum technology.
His contribution to the development of Finnish quantum technology is therefore significant and groundbreaking, and Finland’s significant position in the field would not have been achieved without Pekola’s contribution.
In addition, for the first time, the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation’s doctoral prizes were awarded at the annual celebration. The dissertation prizes were awarded to:
Susanna Heikkilä, PhD, University of Helsinki, Mathematics, Quasiregular geometry: from maps to curves (2024)
Laura Vuorinen, PhD, University of Turku, Physics, High-speed jets downstream of the Earths bow shock (2024).
Daniel Langerreiter, PhD, Aalto University, Chemistry, Synthesis of cellulose based self-sterilizing materials via solid-state reactions (2024).
The dissertation prizes are € 5 000 each.