Caption
The physicists Alain Brillet and Thibault Damour receive awards for their major contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, first announced on 11th February 2016. Alain Brillet, an expert in stabilised lasers and a visionary in the development of gravitational wave detectors, is one of the fathers of Europe's Virgo instrument. The theoretical work of Thibault Damour, a specialist in black holes and gravitational waves, played a decisive role in the analysis of data from the gravitational wave detectors.
