Gregor Weihs

Gregor Weihs (born August 26, 1971 in Innsbruck ) is an Austrian quantum physicist and university professor for photonics at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck . Since 2016 he has also been Vice President for Natural Sciences and Technology of the Austrian Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research (FWF).

Life

Gregor Weihs grew up as the son of a hotel owner and a surveyor in Seefeld in Tyrol . At the suggestion of his class teacher at the Adolf-Pichler-Platz grammar school in Innsbruck , Weihs took part in the Austrian Physics Olympiad for the first time in 1986 , where he took first place in 1988. This enabled him to take part in the International Physics Olympiad (IPHO) , where he won a silver medal for Austria for the first time in 1989 in Warsaw .

After graduating from high school , Weihs began studying physics and mathematics at the University of Innsbruck . In 1994 he completed his degree in physics with his diploma thesis on quantum interferometry on fiber optic beam splitters with Anton Zeilinger and continued his training with a doctorate with Zeilinger. Partly interrupted by civilian service at the Red Cross in Seefeld and a short research stay at Los Alamos National Laboratory (with Paul Kwiat ) for interaction-free quantum measurement , he was able to obtain the decisive data for his dissertation A test of Bell's inequalities under Einstein's locality in 1998 measure, which he wrote and submitted after the Zeilingers work group moved to Vienna. Weihs received his doctorate for his achievements in the presence of Federal President Thomas Klestil on March 13, 2000 " sub auspiciis praesidentis ".

After a short time as a university assistant with Anton Zeilinger in Vienna and a research stay at the JST ERATO project Quantum Information and Computation in Tokyo , Weihs joined Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto at Stanford University as a Consulting Assistant Professor in autumn 2001 , where he and Hui Deng studied condensation was able to detect exciton polaritons in microresonators for the first time. In February 2005 Weihs accepted the offer for an assistant professorship at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he worked, among other things, on quantum cryptography and was also awarded the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Photonics . In 2008 he was appointed to the University of Innsbruck , where he headed the Institute for Experimental Physics from 2013 to 2017 . In 2016 Weihs was elected Vice President for Natural Sciences and Technology of the Austrian Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research (FWF).

Act

Weihs researches in the field of experimental quantum physics of light and semiconductors with the main aim of applications in quantum information processing and to question the fundamentals of quantum mechanics . His most important works include a test of Bell's inequality with independent observers, a first demonstration of quantum cryptography with entangled photons, the observation of entanglement of the orbital angular momentum of photons, the condensation of exciton polaritons , the exclusion of hypothetical higher-order interferences, the proof of Photon pair generation in Bragg waveguides, the experimental implementation of oblivious transfer , the generation of photon pairs from semiconductor quantum dots, the observation of real three-photon interference, the use of a quantum dot molecule in a nanowire as a three-photon source, and the formulation of a law for totally destructive many-particle interference .

Awards

• Award of the Federal Ministry for Science and Transport (1999)
• Loschmidt Prize of the Chemical and Physical Society in Vienna (1999)
• Promotio sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae (2000)
• Canada Research Chair in Quantum Photonics (2005)
• ERC Starting Grant (2010)
• Member of the Young Academy, Austrian Academy of Sciences (2011)
• Wilhelm Exner Medal (2018)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal.Retrieved on April 9, 2019 in Wilhelmexner.org
2. ^ Gregor Weihs: Two-photon interference in optical fiber multiports . In: Phys. Rev. A . tape 54 , 1996, pp. 893 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevA.54.893 .
3. ↑ PG Kwiat et al. : High-efficiency quantum interrogation measurements via the quantum Zeno effect . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 83 , 1999, pp. 4725 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.83.4725 , arxiv : quant-ph / 9909083 .
4. ↑ C. Erven et al. : Entangled quantum key distribution over two free-space optical links . In: Opt. Exp. Band 16 , 2008, p. 16840 , doi : 10.1364 / OE.16.016840 , arxiv : 0807.2289 .
5. ↑ Gregor Weihs et al. : Violation of Bell's inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 81 , 1998, pp. 5039 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.81.5039 , arxiv : quant-ph / 9810080 .
6. ↑ Thomas Jennewein et al. : Quantum cryptography with entangled photons . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 84 , 1999, pp. 4729 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.84.4729 , arxiv : quant-ph / 9912011 .
7. ↑ Alois Mair et al. : Entanglement of the orbital angular momentum states of photons . In: Nature . tape 412 , July 19, 2001, p. 313 , doi : 10.1038 / 35085529 , arxiv : quant-ph / 0104070 .
8. ↑ Hui Deng et al. : Condensation of semiconductor microcavity exciton polaritons . In: Science . tape 298 , no. 5591 , 2002, pp. 199 , doi : 10.1126 / science.1074464 .
9. ↑ Urbasi Sinha et al. : Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics . In: Science . tape 329 , no. 5990 , 2010, p. 418-421 , doi : 10.1126 / science.1190545 , arxiv : 1007.4193 .
10. ↑ Rolf Horn et al. : Monolithic Source of Photon Pairs . In: PhysRevLett . tape 108 , 2012, p. 153605 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.108.153605 .
11. ^ C. Erven: An experimental implementation of oblivious transfer in the noisy storage model . In: Nature Comm. tape 5 , 2014, p. 3418 , arxiv : 1308.5098 .
12. ↑ Harishankar Jayakumar et al. : Time-bin entangled photons from a quantum dot . In: Nature Comm. tape 5 , 2014, p. 4251 , doi : 10.1038 / ncomms5251 , arxiv : 1305.2081 .
13. ↑ Sascha Agne et al. : Observation of Genuine Three-Photon Interference . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 118 , 2017, p. 153602 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.118.153602 , arxiv : 1609.07508 .
14. ↑ Milad Khoshnegar et al. : A solid state source of photon triplets based on quantum dot molecules . In: Nature Comm. tape 8 , 2017, p. 15716 , doi : 10.1038 / ncomms15716 , arxiv : 1510.05898 .
15. ↑ Christoph Dittel et al. : Totally Destructive Many-Particle Interference . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 120 , 2018, p. 240404 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.120.240404 , arxiv : 1801.07014 .