Professor Harald Weinfurter is honoured with the Copernicus Award 2014 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Professor Weinfurter and Professor Marek Żukowski are the winning “tandem” of this year’s Copernicus award, donated by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Foundation for Polish Science.

 

Professor Harald Weinfurter (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) and Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics) and Professor Marek Żukowski (University of Danzig) are the winning “tandem” of this year’s Copernicus award, donated by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP). For more than 20 years by now, the two scientists have been a team in conducting pioneering research in the field of quantum physics and quantum communication, having published the results together in numerous high-rank science journals.

Prof. Weinfurter began his scientific career at the University of Vienna where he studied physics and later on received his doctoral degree. He then spent a couple of years working as a postdoc in Vienna and at the Hahn Meitner Institute in Berlin. He continued his research at the University of Innsbruck where he completed his habilitation in 1996. In 1999 Prof. Weinfurter established a so-called C3-research group at the Chair of Nobel Prize winner Prof. Theodor W. Hänsch at the LMU. In 2010 he has been elected as a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, being associated with the Laser Spectroscopy Division of Prof. Hänsch.

The research of Prof. Weinfurter has a strong focus on experimental quantum interferometry with correlated photons, and on quantum communication including entangled states and quantum correlations. Here he is also interested in possible applications of this fundamental research in the fields of quantum cryptography and quantum metrology. His experiments could not have been brought into realization without the detailed theoretical and fundamental concepts of his Polish colleague Prof. Marek Zukowski.

Prof. Weinfurter has already received several scientific awards, including the Philip Morris Research Prize in 2003 and the Descartes Prize of the European Union in 2004.

The Copernicus award which is bestowed with 100 000 Euro will be presented to Prof. Harald Weinfurter and Prof. Marek Żukowski on September 10, 2014 in Berlin, by Prof. Peter Strohschneider, President of the DFG, and Prof. Maciej Żylicz, President of the FNP. Olivia Meyer-Streng.