International scientific panel

Rainer Blatt

Member of the International Scientific council of Physics

Rainer Blatt is Professor of experimental physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). He has carried out trail-blazing experiments in the fields of precision spectroscopy, quantum metrology and quantum information processing. Blatt works with atoms caught in ion traps which he manipulates using laser beams. This work is based on suggestions made in the mid-1990s by theorists Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller. In 2004 Blatt’s research group succeeded for the first time in transferring the quantum information of one atom in a totally controlled manner onto another atom (teleportation). Two years later, his group already managed to entangle up to eight atoms in a controlled manner. Creating such a first “quantum byte” was a further step on the way towards a quantum computer. 2011 the team managed to push this record to 14 entangled atoms. Furthermore Rainer Blatt took important steps towards successful quantum error correction and the building of quantum simulators. He has received numerous awards for his achievements in the fields of quantum optics and meteorology. In 2012 the German Physical Society awarded him the Stern-Gerlach-Medaille. Together with Ignacio Cirac he won the 2009 Carl Zeiss Research Award. He also received a Humboldt Research Award (2013) and an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (2008).

In 2013 the Australian Academy of Science announced Rainer Blatt as the 2013 Frew Fellow. In 2014 he was awarded the “Tiroler Landespreis für Wissenschaft 2014” (science award of the state of Tyrol) and in 2015 the Ste wart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications.

Rainer Blatt is full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.