All news about scientific awards, prizes and appointments

Last week, Eli Yablonovitch, referred to as the father of the photonic crystal, has been named MPQ Distinguished Scholar, which is an award and research scholarship given to outstanding scientists in the field of optics, photonics, quantum physics, or other areas related to quantum optics by the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. This program allows an awardee to spend up to six months at the Institute to collaborate with its scientific departments. more

The Bernard J. Couillaud Prize in Ultrafast Lasers honours Dr Edoardo Vicentini’s state-of-the-art research on digital holography with femtosecond frequency combs.The award, conferred annually by the Optica Foundation and Coherent Inc., recognises excellent early-career researchers in ultrafast photonics. Awardees receive a financial grant of 20,000 US dollars, intended to support their outstanding innovative research projects. more

In 2018, Joannis Koepsell and his colleagues at MPQ experienced a magnetic moment: They succeeded for the first time in photographically imaging so-called magnetic polarons, using a quantum simulator. Now, almost five years later, for this astounding discovery as part of his PhD thesis, Joannis Koepsell is awarded with the Otto-Hahn-Medal, the dissertation prize of the Max Planck Society for young talented researchers. more

Joannis Koepsell, former PhD Candidate in the group of Immanuel Bloch, receives the award for his outstanding dissertation entitled “Quantum simulation of doped two-dimensional Mott insulators”. The prize is sponsored by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, a private institution that supports scientific research and education with an emphasis on physics. The award is donated to the Faculty of Physics and is endowed with 4,000 euros. more

Every two years, the optics enterprise ZEISS honours outstanding research achievements in the fields of optics and photonics with the "ZEISS Research Award". This year, the award goes to Prof. Dr. Immanuel Bloch – one of the world's leading minds in the development of experiments for quantum simulation with ultracold atoms. The price will be awarded in a gala event on the 26th of June in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.  more

In his thesis he discovered tunable Feshbach resonances between atoms and ions for the first time. For this outstanding result the AMOP section of the German Physical Society awards Pascal Weckesser, Postdoctoral researcher at MPQ, their 2023 dissertation prize. 
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Along with two other researchers, Ferenc Krausz, Director and head of the Attosecond Physics Division at MPQ, receives the "Frontiers of Knowledge Award" in the basic sciences category. Since 2008, the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation annually awards the prize in eight different categories. more

On 19 November 2022, MPQ Director Theodor Hänsch received an honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich. The award honours “his outstanding scientific work that has had such a huge impact on the entire field of modern atomic and molecular physics, especially laser cooling of atoms, and laser-based precision spectroscopy." more