This prestigious award is intended to, “recognize and reward world-class research and artistic creation, prizing contributions of singular impact for their originality and significance. The name of the scheme is intended to denote not only research work that substantially enlarges the scope of our current knowledge – pushing forward the frontiers of the known world – but also the meeting and overlap of different disciplinary areas and the emergence of new fields.”
The citation reads, in part: “for their discovery of topological insulators, a new class of materials with extraordinary electronic properties”