Martí Perarnau Llobet Receives 2018 UPC Thesis Award

Martí Perarnau, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has won an Extraordinary PhD Award for his outstanding doctoral work at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

This year, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) confers an "Extraordinary PhD Award" on Martí Perarnau Llobet, a scientific associate in the Theory Division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Director: Ignacio Cirac).

Every year, the UPC awards a special prize for the best doctoral theses submitted during the academic year in each of its five major subject areas (Architecture, Civil, Industrial, Information and Communications Engineering, and the Sciences).

Martí Perarnau is among the five candidates chosen by the Committee of the UPC’s Doctoral School to receive the award in the Sciences Section for the academic year 2015/16. The prize-winners were selected on the basis of the excellence and impact of their doctoral theses, all of which received the accolade summa cum laude.

In 2016, Perarnau completed his doctoral thesis on ‘Thermodynamics and Quantum Correlations’ under the supervision of Antonio Acín dal Maschio, ICREA Professor and Head of the Quantum Information Theory Group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences ICFO in Barcelona (Spain). In recognition of his scientific achievements, he had received the ICFO PhD Thesis Award in December 2017.

“With his outstanding doctoral thesis, Martí Perarnau Llobet has laid an excellent foundation for his further research in theoretical physics. We congratulate him on this special award,” says Ignacio Cirac (Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics).

“My thesis was devoted to the study of thermodynamics in the quantum regime. Since I joined Professor Cirac’s Theory Group, I have broadened my research interests to include the fields of quantum optics and quantum metrology,” Perarnau explains.

The 2018 UPC Thesis Award ceremony took place on Friday the 9th of November 2018 in Barcelona.

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After completing his Master's degree at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Perarnau moved to the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona in September 2012 to do the research for his doctorate. There, he worked in the Research Group on Quantum Information Theory under the supervision of Antonio Acín dal Maschio, Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). Having defended his doctoral thesis, which received the grade summa cum laude, in the summer of 2016, he continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at ICFO. In January 2017, he joined Ignacio Cirac’s Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching near Munich (Germany).