The 2005 McMillan Award has been given to Rutgers Alumnus, Dr Peter Armitage
Armitage was a physics Major at Rutgers, graduating in 1994. The McMillan award is given annually to a to a young condensed matter physicist (theoretical or experimental) for distinguished accomplishments. Past recipients include many leading figures in condensed matter physics. Peter Armitage has been awarded this year's prize for "his crucial contributions to the field of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy studies of electron-doped superconductors". High temperature superconductors are known to be doped Mott insulators - the "hole-doped" have been extensively studied throughout the 90s - but it is only recently that it has been possible to carry out detailed photo-emission studies of their close cousins, the electron doped cuprates. Armitage and co-workers at Stanford University were able to characterize the nature of the electronic excitations in neodinium cerium cuprate, and show that the electron-electron interaction effects were weaker than in their hole-doped counterparts. Armitage has been involved in many other areas of spectroscopy, including optical conductivity. Armitage is currently an assistant Professor at John's Hopkins University, on leave at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.