In the 20th Century, the Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) was observed in atom gases at the temperatures close to the absolute zero (Nobel Prize in Physics 2001). Then, Kavokin and co-authors have predicted and experimentally demonstrated BEC of light-matter quasiparticles, exciton-polaritons, at the room temperature. This major breakthrough in condensed matter physics paved the way to the development of polariton lasers, transistors and quantum networks.
Falling Walls Berlin Science Week
Falling Walls
Breaking the Wall to Bose-Einstein Condensation at Room Temperature
Alexey Kavokin
Saint-Petersburg State University
Alexey Kavokin received his PhD in physics from the Ioffe institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1993. He became a Professor of the Blaise Pascal university (France) in 1998, the Chair of Nanophysics and Photonics at the university of Southampton, UK, in 2005, and Chair Professor and Director of the International Center for Polaritonics in Hangzhou, China, in 2018. In 2000, Alexey Kavokin received an International Quantum Device Award for prediction of the room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensation of exciton polaritons that led to the development of polariton lasers.