Tilman Esslinger awarded the Micius Prize 2025
This year's prize from the Micius Quantum Foundation celebrates quantum simulation in optical lattices, a field which Esslinger and his group in the Department of Physics have been spearheading from the very beginning.
The Micius Prize 2025 is awarded to Professor Tilman Esslinger from ETH Zurich, to Professor Immanuel Bloch from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and LMU Munich and to Professor Markus Greiner from Harvard University for "the pioneering experimental realization of bosonic and fermionic Hubbard models in optical lattices as analog quantum simulators of strongly interacting many-body systems for comprehensive investigations of quantum phases, transport, and topological phenomena."
Established in 2018 by the Micius Quantum Foundation and named after ancient Chinese philosopher Micius, the Micius Quantum Prize is awarded to scientists who have made outstanding contributions to quantum communications, quantum simulation, quantum computation and quantum metrology. Awardees receive a cash prize of about 150,000 US dollars and a medal. Laureates of the Micius Prize include Peter Shor, Anton Zeilinger and Nicolas Gisin.
Esslinger and his team use ultracold gases of bosonic as well as fermionic atoms to gain new insights into quantum many-body physics. The experiments carried out in Esslinger's laboratories have investigated a variety of phenomena, including the realisation of Mott-insulating phases in Bose and Fermi gases, the demonstrations of the Dicke model and the topological Haldane model, and the observation of quantum transport in a Fermi gas.
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