Dr. Kostya Novoselov is the 2007 recipient of the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize. He is recognised for a record of sustained achievement covering his postgraduate and postdoctoral research, at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology, Chemogolovka, Russia, the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands and more recently at University of Manchester, UK, in which he has worked at the forefront solid state research employing experimental low temperature and high magnetic field techniques. Specifically, he is recognised for his part in the discovery of a new class of materials, two-dimensional atomic crystals, in particular graphene. The work entailed the difficult task of fabricating transistors from such delicate structures.
Dr Novoselov and co-workers have discovered a wide range of new physical phenomena in these materials, including the observation of the quantum Hall effect in graphene and the remarkable properties of the charge carriers, which behave as Dirac particles. The work has had an extraordinary international impact and has opened up a new field of condensed matter physics which has allowed quantum relativistic phenomena to be studied experimentally in a bench top experimental environment.