Worth €60,000 it will facilitate more extensive cooperation between the internationally renowned materials scientist and his German hosts,  Mainz chemist Professor Dr. Claudia Felser (right)  and the Karlsruhe physicist Professor Dr. Hilbert von Löhneysen.Humboldt Award winner, Cava plans to come  to Germany for an extended research stay next year. 

Cava is among the leading researchers into strongly correlated electron materials. These include high-temperature superconductors that employ cuprates and iron pnictides and rare earth alloys whose electrons exhibit unusual characteristics, such as superconductivity that can induce magnetism.

He has written over 600 publications, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, and has received numerous prizes, including this year's ACS Award  Inorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS). Cava is also considered an excellent teacher,  demonstrated by the numerous teaching awards he has won.

Leslie Schoop, (right) a doctoral student at the MAINZ Graduate School, is currently working on her dissertation in Cava's laboratory at Princeton University. When Schoop finishes her dissertation, she will receive a double degree from both Mainz University and Princeton.

The emphasis of the joint projects being undertaken by Cava and the JGU researchers is a systematic search for new superconductors.
The joint efforts of the researchers working under (left) Professor Hilbert von Löhneysen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are focused on the investigation of strongly correlated electron materials and the analysis of new superconductors, such as iron pnictide systems.

Background:
In 2008 a family of materials joined the high-Tc club: the iron based pnictides. The pnictides are similar to the cuprates in that they are quasi-2D materials, displaying superconductivity in close proximity to magnetic order.The parent compounds of two types of iron pnictides are show below.

On the right is a so-called '122' pnictide BaFe2As2 containing iron-arsenic layers (shown in red and white) sandwiched between barium layers. On the left is a '1111' pnictide SmFeAsO, which contains the same iron-arsenic layers, but this time between samarium-oxygen layers. The parent compounds themselves are not superconducting but can be doped in various ways to induce high-Tc superconductivity. This is again in analogy to the cuprates.