BEC Awards

Senior and Junior BEC Awards 2013

sponsored by TOPTICA Photonics AG

The Scientific and Award Committees of the biannual Bose–Einstein Conference Series are pleased to announce Prof. Immanuel Bloch and Prof. Markus Greiner as the recipients of the BEC Awards 2013. The awards will be presented at the Bose–Einstein Conference in Sant Feliu, Spain, 7–13 September 2013.

Professor Immanuel Bloch will receive the senior BEC Award 2013 for his pioneering experimentalcontributions to the field of quantum many‐body physics with cold atoms in optical lattices.

Professor Markus Greiner will receive the junior BEC Award 2013 for the development of a technique for imaging two-­‐dimensional quantum gases in optical lattices with single-­atom resolution.

Professor Immanuel Bloch is Scientific Director at the Max­‐Planck­‐Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching (Germany) and Full Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany). He has made seminal experimental contributions to the field of strongly correlated many­‐body systems in optical lattices. Starting from the observation, in 2001, of the superfluid‐to‐Mott-insulator quantum phase  transition for bosons in an optical lattice, he studied the collapse and revival of the matter­‐wave field of a Bose‐Einstein condensate in an optical lattice, observed the entanglement dynamics through controlled collisions, and realized a Tonks-­Girardeau gas in a one­‐dimensional lattice. He and his co-workers pioneered noise-­correlation measurements for ultracold quantum gases, which led to the observation of bunching and anti­‐bunching in matter waves. Furthermore they observed and controlled superexchange interactions in optical lattices, and developed a single-­atom­‐resolving fluorescence microscope.

Professor Markus Greiner is Professor of Physics at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (USA). He and his group have developed a fluorescence microscope for quantum gases in optical lattices. In ground­‐
breaking experiments, they have detected thousands of individual atoms with near‐unity fidelity on individual sites of a Hubbard­‐regime optical lattice. This unprecedented degree of control over a quantum many­‐body system has opened up an avenue to studying Mott­‐insulating phases and other strongly correlated quantum phases in optical lattices by locally probing atom­‐number statistics. More recently, Markus Greiner and his co-­workers demonstrated quantum magnetism in an Ising spin chain in an optical lattice and observed transition from a paramagnet to an anti-­ferromagnet.  

Committee Members of the BEC awards 2013:  Ehud  Altman, Eric Cornell, Jean Dalibard, Tilman Esslinger, Gora Shylapnikov and Ian Spielman.
Sponsor: TOPTICA PHOTONICS AG
Contact:  Ehud Altman, Chair of the BEC 2013 conference, ehud.altman@weizmann.ac.il
 
 

Previous award Recipients

BEC senior award 2011: Gora Shlyapnikov
BEC junior award 2011: Ian Spielman