Anton Zeilinger
Austrian Academy of Sciences
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Primary Section: 33, Applied Physical Sciences Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2013)
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Biosketch
Anton Zeilinger is Professor of Physics emeritus at the University of Vienna and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a Quantum Physicist recognized for his "pioneering conceptional and experimental contribution to the foundation of Quantum Physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of Quantum Information" as mentioned in his citation for the inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK). He is known particularly for his experimental and theoretical work on entanglement, most notably realization of multi-particle entangled states, quantum teleportation, quantum communication and cryptography, photonic quantum computation, and matter-wave interferometry from neutrons to fullerenes, the latter investigating decoherence and the quantum-classical transition in detail. Anton Zeilinger was born in Austria in 1945 and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1971. He was on the faculties of the Technical University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck before joining the University of Vienna in 1999 where he has served as Chair of the Physics Department. Zeilinger held numerous visiting appointments, including M.I.T., the Technical University of Munich, Humboldt University Berlin, Oxford University and the Chaire International at the College de France. Anton Zeilinger has been President of the Austrian Physical Society and is currently President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
My main research interests are fundamental experiments in quantum mechanics with focus on quantum entanglement, quantum interferometry and quantum information. A particular focus are novel entangled states and their applications in quantum communication and quantum computation. With my group I have developed sources for entangled photons, observed three and four photon entanglement and entanglement of high dimensional quantum states. These methods were and are being applied to the implementation of quantum communication tasks such as hyper-dense coding, entanglement-based quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping, the teleportation of an entangled state. Such experiments also include linear optical one-way quantum computation, realization of various photonic quantum gates, and quantum cloning. Among the fundamental experiments performed with my group are interaction-free measurement, a non-local quantum eraser, a fast quantum number generator and the self-cooling of a micro mirror by radiation pressure. In parallel I am working on tests of quantum mechanics, for example a Bell inequality experiment closing various loopholes, tests of Legett's inequality and of the GHZ contradiction and realizations of the Kochen-Specker paradigm with three dimensional states. My current interests also include entangled orbital angular momentum states of very high dimension and complexity , realization of the momentum and position entangled states as proposed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, novel quantum imaging ideas based on indistinguishability and quantum communication over large distances, for example on the Canary Islands and with satellites.
