By Michael Banks
It’s been a great month for the people behind the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO), which recently discovered gravitational waves.
In early May, Ron Drever, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss – who co-founded LIGO – together bagged a cool $1m share of a special $3m Breakthrough Prize together with more than 1000 LIGO scientists, who shared the remaining $2m.
Earlier this week, the trio won the $1.2m Shaw Prize and today it has been announced that they have been awarded the $1m Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. Each is now more than $1m richer than they were at the start of May.
Also today, the Kavli Foundation announced that Gerd Binnig, a former member of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland, Christoph Gerber from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Calvin Quate of Stanford University, US, have been awarded the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for the invention of atomic force microscopy (AFM) 30 years ago.
You can read a recent interview with Gerber about how AFM continues to shape nanoscale research that was published in May’s Physics World focus issue on nanotechnology.
