The experimental physicist Simon Baier from the research group led by Francesca Ferlaino will receive the IQOQI Dissertation Prize 2019, a prize worth 1,000 euros, which will be awarded for the sixth time this year and honors scientific excellence in the field of quantum physics.
Simon Baier is honored for his dissertation "Ultracold Dipolar Erbium Atoms: From Scattering Phenomena to Quantum Simulations", which gives an overview of his research on dipolar quantum phenomena. It documents Simon Baier's research on the long-range magnetic interaction of ultracold particles, which he studied in the group of Francesca Ferlaino. The scientists use ultracold quantum gases of strongly magnetic erbium atoms as an experimental platform. These particles are trapped in a three-dimensional optical lattice and thus form a quantum simulator for solid state phenomena with long range interactions. With this setup, Simon Baier's team was able to observe and investigate numerous previously unexplored dipolar phenomena in few and many-body physics.
Award for outstanding achievements
The dissertation prize is awarded to promising young physicists at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck for their outstanding achievements. The IQOQI Dissertation Prize is endowed with 1,000 Euro and is awarded to graduates of the PhD or doctoral studies at the University of Innsbruck who have made outstanding scientific achievements in the field of quantum physics. Following Philipp Schindler and Simon Stellmer in 2013, Alexander Glätzle in 2014, Albert Frisch in 2015, Florian Meinert in 2016 and Petar Jurcevic in 2018, this year Simon Baier from the research group around Francesca Ferlaino at the Institute of Experimental Physics will receive this award. The prize is expected to be awarded in a ceremony at the IQOQI in March.
About
Simon Baier was born in 1988 and studied physics at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed his master's degree in 2012. For his PhD he worked on ultracold dipolar quantum gases in the group of Francesca Ferlaino and has since 2018 been working as an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow at QuTech and Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology.