It’s the turn of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Published: Wednesday, Oct 9th 2024, 05:40
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At the halfway point of this year's Nobel Prize season, the winners in the chemistry category will be announced today. One of the favorites for the award is Michele Parrinello, who conducted research at ETH Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano.
At 11.45 a.m. at the earliest, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm will reveal the secret of who it is awarding this year's prestigious prize to. The search is on for the successors to US-based researchers Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, who were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for the discovery and development of so-called quantum dots.
According to the data company Clarivate, Parrinello could win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with his colleague Roberto Car, who conducts research in the USA. The accuracy rate of the predictions of favorites is always modest. The researchers developed the Car-Parrinello method. The method uses quantum mechanics to represent the interaction of moving atoms. This allows researchers to precisely observe the movement of individual atoms in different systems.
Nobel Prize for Literature and Peace Prize to follow
After medicine and physics, chemistry is traditionally the third of a total of six prize categories in which the Nobel Prizes are awarded by various institutions in Stockholm and Oslo.
The Nobel Prize for Literature will follow on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Finally, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded next Monday, the only award that is not based on the will of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
Breakdown before the 2023 award announcement
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will want to avoid a mishap like last year's prize announcement: Back then, the names of Bawendi, Brus and Ekimov were inadvertently included in an announcement sent out to Swedish media in the morning, around four hours before the official announcement. The Academy's Secretary General, Hans Ellegren, regretted the mishap as "very unfortunate".
Who receives the Nobel Prizes is actually kept strictly secret until the official announcement by the respective awarding institution. Not even the names of the nominees are published until 50 years have passed - as stipulated by the statutes of the Nobel Foundation.
This year's Nobel Prizes are once again endowed with eleven million Swedish kronor (just under 970,000 euros) per prize category. If the award in one category goes to two or three laureates at the same time, they share this sum. The world-famous Nobel Medals are then presented at a ceremony on the anniversary of Nobel's death, December 10.
©Keystone/SDA
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