Dr. Anton Zeilinger

Anton Zeilinger, born in 1945 in Austria, received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1971. With Helmut Rauch at the Technical University of Vienna and with Clifford G. Shull (Nobel Prize 1994) at M.I.T., he worked on neutron interferometry, a pioneering technology for quantum information science. He held visiting appointments at Institut Laue-Langevin Grenoble, Collège de France, Oxford University, Technical University Munich and Humboldt University Berlin. In 1990, he became Chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and in 1999 at the University of Vienna.

He is presently Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna and Senior Scientist at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna (IQOQI Vienna), where he enjoys working with his group of graduate students and post-docs. Anton Zeilinger has always been deeply interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics with an emphasis on entanglement. Together with Greenberger and Horne, he pioneered multi-particle entanglement (GHZ-states) which, together with their generalizations, have become essential to many quantum information and quantum computation tasks. His achievements in applications include realizations of basic quantum computation gates and procedures with photons, entanglement-based quantum cryptography, and long-distance quantum communication across the river Danube, between two Canary Islands, and via satellites together with his student Jian-Wei Pan. He also performed tests of Bell’s inequality, most recently using distant quasars as sources for randomness.

Among his awards and prizes are the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal, the Micius Quantum Prize and the Quantum Communication Award (Japan). Anton Zeilinger is a member of a number of science academies and holds several honorary professorships and honorary doctorates.