The Ignaz L. Lieben Prize is the longest-standing and most highly endowed award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). This prize has be awarded on May 8 in Vienna to the Innsbruck quantum physicist Hannes Pichler for his groundbreaking work in the field of quantum many-body physics and quantum information science. He developed innovative algorithms for Rydberg atom-based quantum simulators and formulated fundamental principles of chiral quantum optics.
Pichler's research enables the control and manipulation of quantum mechanical systems by light and has led to groundbreaking insights into artificial quantum matter and, among other things, to the discovery of quantum many-body scars - a quantum mechanical effect underlying a counterintuitive, periodic behavior of many-body systems. In addition, new methods have been developed to solve classical optimization problems using neutral atoms, and new protocols for fundamental quantum gates have been designed, which form the basis of modern designs of quantum processors with neutral atoms.
On Hannes Pichler
He has been Professor of Quantum Optics at the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and research group leader at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck since 2020. Hannes Pichler was born in 1986 in Brixen, South Tyrol. He studied physics at the University of Innsbruck and completed his doctorate under Peter Zoller. From 2016 to 2019 he was at Harvard University as an ITAMP Postdoctoral Fellow and from 2019 to 2020 at the California Institute of Technology as a Gordon and Betty Moore Postdoctoral Fellow.
Prestigious award
The Ignaz L. Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences was established in 1863 and named after the founders of the Lieben banking house. Renowned researchers such as the physicists Marietta Blau and Lise Meitner or the two Nobel Prize winners Viktor Hess and Otto Loewi were honored with this prize. After the Anschluss in 1938, the Ignaz L. Lieben Prize was discontinued. The members of the founding family were expelled by the Nazis. Heinrich Lieben, who had signed the last founder's letter in 1937, was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.