Mezei, the visiting John Wheatley Scholar working in the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Division, will receive the award, along with about $6,000, next month during the association's four-day European Conference on Neutron Scattering in Budapest, Hungary.
The award is named for Professor Haelg, the initiator of neutron scattering in Switzerland, who made a generous donation to fund the award. It will be given every other year to a European scientist for outstanding work in neutron scattering with long-term impact on scientific or technical applications.
"I feel particularly honored in that I'm the first person to receive this award," said Mezei. He also was the first John Wheatley Scholar, a distinguished scientific position created by Los Alamos for visiting scientists who bring expertise to the areas of neutron scattering, thermal physics or condensed matter physics.
Mezei currently is developing new spallation techniques at Los Alamos to advance areas of neutron scattering normally performed only with nuclear reactors by switching to accelerator-based neutron sources. He also is using neutron scattering techniques to study the dynamic behavior of complex matter.
Mezei has made several seminal contributions to neutron scattering over the past three decades, including the introduction of so-called neutron supermirrors and of a new kind of spin flippers that can turn the neutron's spin into any direction. He is best known for inventing a high-resolution neutron spectrometry technique called the neutron spin echo method in 1972, which has helped researchers to better understand magnetic materials, polymers, proteins, glasses, superconducting vortices, quantum fluids and other condensed matter. Mezei also originated the concept of the long-pulse spallation source in 1993.
Mezei received his bachelor's degree and doctorate in physics from Eotvos University in Budapest. His scientific career includes posts at the Central Research Institute for Physics (Budapest), Institut Laue-Langevin (Grenoble, France), the Technical University and the Hahn-Meitner Institut (both in Berlin).
Mezei received the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize in 1986, the most prestigious award reserved for European scientists for contributions in condensed matter physics. He was director of the Berlin Neutron Scattering Center before coming to Los Alamos in 1997. Mezei plans to share his time between Los Alamos and Berlin to combine resources at the two institutions to accelerate development of new concepts in spallation neutron research.
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