This week Prof. Francesca Ferlaino, experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria, has received the Junior BEC Award for her pioneering work on dipolar quantum gases. The award, honoring outstanding achievements in the field of Bose-Einstein condensation, was presented at an international conference on quantum gases in Spain.
The award committee of the Bose-Einstein Conference Series honors Prof. Francesca Ferlaino, Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information and Professor for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, with the Junior BEC Award 2019. Ferlaino has received this prize for her “pioneering work on Bose-Einstein condensation of dipolar Erbium atoms and more generally degenerate quantum gases with long-range interactions and for realizing novel quantum phases of matter with such systems.” Francesca Ferlaino and her team created the first Bose-Einstein condensate of erbium atoms in 2012 and very recently discovered, simultaneously with a German and an Italian team, supersolidity in dipolar quantum gases.
The Prize ceremony took place at the BEC Conference in Sant Feliu de de Guíxols, which is a prestigious biannual conference gathering prominent scientists from all over the world since the first discover of Bose-Einstein condensates. The International Senior & Junior BEC awards have been established in 2011 to honor outstanding research in experimental and theoretical physics of quantum degenerate atomic gases.
This year’s winners of the Senior BEC Award are the physicists Lev Pitaevskii and Sandro Stringari from the University of Trento in Italy. They were honored for the key role they have played, with both their individual works and their collaborative ones, on our understanding of Bose-Einstein condensates and Fermi gases.
Francesca Ferlaino, born in 1977, began her study in physics at the University Federico II of Naples, where she received her master in 1998. In 2004, she received her doctoral degree from the University of Florence and LENS. She joined Innsbruck in 2007 as post-doc and Lise-Meitner fellow to work in the group of Rudolf Grimm until she became appointed as Professor at the University of Innsbruck and Scientific Director at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in 2014.