| Citation | Professor Jeremy Mark Hutson, Professor of Chemistry and Physics, University of Durham
Jeremy Hutson is a distinguished chemical physicist whose theoretical work on atomic and molecular clusters has revolutionised our understanding of intermolecular forces. He has also made influential contributions to the theory of cold and ultracold molecules. He pioneered the use of the spectra of Van der Waals complexes to determine accurate intermolecular potential energy surfaces, and his surfaces for prototype systems such as Ar-HF, Ar-HCl and Ar-CO2 are recognised as the best available for any system. His work on the spectra of Van der Waals trimers revealed a hitherto unrecognised force that dominates non-additive effects in clusters containing polar molecules and ions. His ground-breaking work on interactions involving free-radical species provided crucial insights into molecular structure and chemical dynamics beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The models he has developed are widely used by both experimentalists and theoreticians. He is now working to understand molecules and their interactions in the novel ultracold regime below 1 millikelvin, where molecular collisions can be controlled with electric and magnetic fields and a new ultracold chemistry is starting to emerge.
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