AQT co-founders receive prestigious Chinese science award

April 2019: We are pleased to announce that two of the co-founders of AQT, Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller, together with one of our board members, Ignacio Cirac, are awarded the Micius Prize, which is presented for the first time this year.

The Chinese Micius Quantum Foundation is awarding the prizes to promote outstanding research in quantum physics. The awards for the years 2018 and 2019, which are endowed with up to one million yuán (approximately 150,000 US-Dollars), go to twelve physicists whose work has provided fundamental knowledge in quantum research, opening up opportunities for new applications worldwide. The Foundation announced the winners on April 26.
Rainer Blatt (University of Innsbruck and OeAW) is honored for his seminal experiments on quantum computers, and Peter Zoller (University of Innsbruck and OeAW) along with his former Innsbruck colleague Juan Ignacio Cirac (Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics) are receiving the prize for key theoretical work on quantum computers. Together, they pioneered ion trap quantum computing and laid the groundwork for the technology AQT is using today.
The prize will be presented to the winners on September 20, 2019 in the Chinese city of Hefei. It is named after the Chinese philosopher Micius, who lived in the fifth century BC and who discovered that light travels in a straight line. The prize committee is composed of representatives of major and internationally renowned Chinese scientific institutions, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University in Beijing, the University of Science and Technology of China, and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

For more information, visit the website of the Micius Prize, or have a look at the IQOQI news release.