Frank Steglich

Who is Frank Steglich?

Frank Steglich is a German physicist.

He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1986 and a number of other recognitions. He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany and is currently also Vice President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Frank Steglich discovered the first heavy fermion superconductor, CeCu₂Si₂, while working as a postdoctoral student in Cologne, Germany in 1978. CeCu₂Si₂ is the first metallic system to be discovered in which the superconductivity is driven by electron-electron interactions, rather than the electron-phonon interaction that is responsible for conventional BCS superconductivity. The discovery of this material revolutionized research into superconductivity, establishing the reality of electronically mediated superconductivity and foreshadowing the discovery of a wide range of heavy electron superconductors, and the subsequent discovery of electronically mediated pairing in cuprate high temperature superconductors.