Kate Ross, a postdoctoral fellow at IQM and NIST, is the recipient of the 2014 Prize for Outstanding Student Research, given by the Neutron Scattering Society of America. The award recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the field by students who have performed much of their work at North American neutron facilities. Go here for the JHU press release. Kate’s award citation is “for seminal neutron scattering studies of exotic ground states, ground state selection, and spin excitations in XY pyrochlore magnets.”

Kate’s research focuses on pyrochlore magnets, which have been a playground for the physics of exotic ground states, as many different magnetic ions can be made to decorate the pyrochlore lattice—a network of corner-sharing tetrahedral and one of the defining architectures supporting geometrical frustration in three dimensions.