Prize Recipient

Qikun Xue
Tsinghua University

"For groundbreaking theoretical and experimental studies on the collective electronic properties of materials that reflect topological aspects of their band structure."

Qikun Xue received his BSc degree from Shandong University, China in 1984, and earned his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, he worked as a research associate at the Institute for Materials Research of Tohoku University, Japan and a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Physics of North Carolina State University, US, respectively. He became a professor at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999 and then he moved to Tsinghua University in 2005 and worked as a professor at the Department of Physics till today. In 2020 he became the third President of Southern University of Science and Technology, China and joined as a chair professor at the Department of Physics. He is currently Vice President of Chinese Physical Society. He was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005 and a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. Prof. Qikun Xue’s research interests include scanning tunneling microcopy and spectroscopy, molecular beam epitaxy, low-dimensional and interface-related superconductivity, topological insulators, and quantum size effects in various low-dimensional structures. His group experimentally discovered the quantum anomalous Hall effect in thin films of Cr-doped (BiSb)2Te3 magnetic topological insulator and the interface enhanced high temperature superconductivity in monolayer FeSe films. He won the TWAS Prize in Physics in 2010, the Future Science Prize for Physical Science in 2016, China’s Natural Science Award (the First Prize) in 2018, The Fritz London Memorial Prize in 2020, and Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in 2020.