J.C. Séamus Davis, the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell, will receive the 2009 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize for Superconductivity Experiments.

The prize, regarded as one of the most prestigious in the field, is awarded every three years for outstanding experiments that illuminate the nature of superconductivity. Davis was cited "for pushing the limits of spectroscopic imaging scanning tunneling microscopy at low temperatures and applying it to pioneering studies of the cuprate high-temperature superconductors."

Davis has built, in the basement of Clark Hall, a highly sensitive scanning tunneling microscope capable of resolving details smaller than the diameter of an atom; he uses it to study the behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors.

The prize will be presented at the Ninth International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity, Sept. 7-12, in Tokyo. It consists of a diploma and a cash award of $5,000 donated by Elsevier, publisher of the journal Physica C-Superconductivity and its Applications. Davis has been invited to present a plenary lecture on his research at the conference.

The prize was established in 1999 in honor of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926), winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of superconductivity and related low-temperature research.