A highly cited researcher
09/25/2014Würzburg physicist Professor Laurens Molenkamp has been honoured as "Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate" in recognition of his highly impactful work that receives broad attention in the scientific world.
Laurens Molenkamp is one of the "2014 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates" in physics as has recently been announced by the US company Thomson Reuters. According to the press release, Molenkamp's research results have been cited particularly often by other scientists worldwide in the last years. The citation frequency is considered to be an indicator of the scientific quality of a work. It is determined based on an analysis of data within the "Web of Science", the premier global scientific platform according to Thomson Reuters.
The company says that Molenkamp's work has been cited so often in the past decades that it ranks him in the top 0.1 percent of most frequently cited scientists in his domain. Not only does Molenkamp have "stratospheric citation totals", he has also published high-impact reports in renowned journals over several years.
Spintronics and topological insulators
Laurens Molenkamp (57) is regarded as one of the fathers of semiconductor spintronics. It is expected that this technology will make information processing and computer engineering considerably more powerful.
The physicist was the first researcher in the world to succeed in the experimental realization of topological insulators. Since then, this novel material class has been researched intensively as it is likely to be essential for further progress in spintronics: topological insulators should enable the creation in future of even smaller and more powerful computer chips.
Laurens Molenkamp’s career to date
Laurens Molenkamp, born in Garrelsweer in the Netherlands in 1956, studied Physical Chemistry at the University of Groningen. After obtaining his doctorate, he worked in the research laboratory of the company Philips in Eindhoven for ten years. There he began his work on quantum transport in semiconductor nanostructures, which he has continued to this day. In 1994, Molenkamp joined RWTH Aachen University as a Professor. In 1999, he was appointed Chairman of Experimental Physics III at the University of Würzburg and was placed in charge of the local molecular beam epitaxy laboratory.
He has received several internationally renowned awards for his cutting-edge research into topological insulators, including the Europhysics Prize in 2010, the Oliver Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012, and the Physics Frontiers Prize in 2013.
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