We remember Prof. Dr. Peter Toschek, who died in Hamburg on June 25, 2020, at the age of 87. He was a pioneer of quantum research and laser spectroscopy and was the doctoral supervisor of MPQ director and Nobel laureate Theodor Hänsch: "With Peter Toschek we have lost an admirable scholar and researcher as well as an incomparable person."

For his seminal and pioneering work in the area of quantum thermodynamics which “significantly improved our understanding of how fundamental thermodynamic processes behave in the quantum regime", Martí Perarnau Llobet, former postdoc in Ignacio Cirac's theory group, has received the NJP Early Career Award.

Information and safety instructions for all scientists, employees and guests at MPQ

Physicists at the MPQ have engineered the lightest optical mirror imaginable. The novel metamaterial is made of a single structured layer consisting only of a few hundred identical atoms arranged in the two dimensional array of an optical lattice formed by interfering laser beams. So far, the mirror is the only one of its kind. 

An international team of physicists from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics together with collaborators from the University of Cambridge, TU Berlin and the Université Libre de Bruxelles succeeded in realizing a novel genuine time-dependent topological system with ultracold atoms in periodically-driven optical honeycomb lattices.

Semiconductors play an important role, be it in electronics, optoelectronics or photovoltaics. But like other solid bodies, they are quantum many-body systems. Therefore, a calculation of their material properties would overburden conventional computers. Instead, this task could be performed by a quantum system with comparable properties that is fully controllable from the outside.