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We congratulate YRC STRUC­TURES member Klaus Paschek and YRC alumnus Nikolas Liebster on receiving this year's Otto Haxel Award for Physics. The annual dissertation prize has been awarded by the KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e.V. (KFG) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in co­operation with the German Physical Society (DPG) since 2017. It honours the three best doctoral dissertations at KIT and at the universities of Göttingen and Hei­del­berg — the three institutions where nuclear physicist Otto Haxel (1909–1998) conducted his research. 

Dr. Liebster received the award for his dissertation on Pattern Formation and Supersolid Sound Modes in a Driven Superfluid, completed in the re­search group of Markus Oberthaler at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP) of Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty. His re­search focuses on quan­tum systems far from equilibrium, where novel steady states can emerge that have different properties from the same system at equilibrium. In certain cases, theo­re­ti­cal frameworks from equilibrium physics can be applied to understand their behaviour. In his thesis, Nikolas Liebster studied the emergence of such a steady state far from equilibrium, specifically in a Bose-Einstein condensate with periodically modulated interactions. The modulation results in the emergence of self-organized lattice structures, effectively crystallizing the system. Dr. Liebster showed that this far-from-equilibrium state has the properties of a supersolid, a strange state of quan­tum matter that is simultaneously solid and superfluid.  This work provides new insights into pattern formation and the nonlinear dynamics of quan­tum fluids.

Dr. Paschek received the award for his dissertation From Space to the Hadean Earth: Prebiotic Synthesis and the Origins of Life, completed in the laboratory astrophysics group led by Thomas Henning at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). In his thesis, he investigated how the first building blocks of life may have arisen on the early Earth several billion years ago. Organic molecules and their precursors could have been brought to Earth by meteorites, whose impacts back then were far more frequent – or they could have formed on Earth itself in what are known as “Darwin’s warm little ponds”. These are  shallow, warm bodies of water, in which compounds produced from volcanically released gases and atmospheric photochemistry could have accumulated and undergone further prebiotic reactions. In his thesis, Dr. Paschek showed that both scenarios can provide viable pathways toward the formation of RNA building blocks and other prebiotic molecules under plausible early-Earth conditions. In particular, his work shows that a previously problematic aspect of the terrestrial scenario – an early atmosphere thought to be too oxidizing for efficient prebiotic chemistry – could have been overcome by geological processes such as serpentinization, while also providing a quantitative explanation for how key prebiotic molecules could form in carbonaceous meteorite parent bodies before being delivered to Earth.

The award ceremony took place on July 13, 2026, at the KFG summer reception on the KIT South Campus in Karlsruhe. The Otto Haxel Award was established by Hans Joachim Langmann in memory of his doctoral advisor.

Further information:

• Webpage of the Otto Haxel Dissertation Prize (German)
• Kirchhoff Institute for Physics
• Max Planck Institute for Astronomy