Prize Recipient

Ilya Belopolski
Princeton University

"For the discovery of the first 3D topological magnet and of several novel Weyl semi metals from ARPES experiments."

Ilya received his B.A. in physics in 2012 from Columbia University, NY, USA, where he researched gravitational waves with Professor Szabolcs Márka and the LIGO collaboration. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2019 under the supervision of Professor M. Zahid Hasan at Princeton University, NJ, USA. In his dissertation, Ilya leveraged state-of-the-art angle-, time- and spin-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to achieve groundbreaking advances in the field of topological quantum matter, including topological insulators, topological magnets and Weyl semimetals. He theoretically co-predicted and observed the first emergent Weyl fermions in crystalline tantalum arsenide, TaAs [Xu*, Belopolski* et al. Science 349, 6248 (2015)], work for which he was awarded the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship and Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics of Princeton University. He subsequently observed the first topological chiral semimetal in RhSi [Sanchez*, Belopolski* et al. Nature 567, 500 (2019)]. He further discovered the first three-dimensional magnetic topological phase in the room-temperature magnet Co2MnGa [Belopolski et al. Science 365, 1278 (2019)], providing a new bridge between quantum magnetism and Weyl electronic topology. Since 2020, Ilya has been a Special Postdoctoral Researcher with Professor Yoshinori Tokura at the Center for Emergent Matter Science of RIKEN, Saitama, Japan, where he is exploring exotic quantum phases arising from the interplay of superconductivity, magnetism and topology.

Richard Greene (Chair), Anand Bhattacharya, Peter Fischer, Vidya Madhavan, Natasha Perkins, Kyle Shen, Judith Yang