Tilman Esslinger

Tilman Esslinger ( born July 25, 1965) is a German physicist. He is a professor at the ETH Zurich, where he works in the field of ultracold quantum gases and the optical lattice.

Life

Tilman Esslinger earned his doctorate in 1995 in physics at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics ( Germany ). For his dissertation, he worked under the direction of Theodor Hänsch of laser cooling and optical lattices. After the graduation he built in Hänsch department its own working group, and a pioneer in the field of atomic lasers, observed long-range phase coherence in a Bose -Einstein condensate and the quantum phase transition in a Bose gas from a superfluid to a Mott insulator. After his habilitation Esslinger was appointed in October 2001 as a full professor at the ETH Zurich, where he made pioneering contributions in the fields of one-dimensional atomic gases, atomic Fermi -Hubbard models and the fusion of quantum gas experiments with cavity quantum electrodynamics.

Work

The research of Esslinger and his colleagues have proposed that an interdisciplinary exchange between groups in the fields of quantum gases and solid state physics. Important results of recent years include the development of a quantum simulator for graphene, the development of an opto- mechanical system consisting of an optical resonator and a quantum gas in which it was first observed in the thickness of quantum phase transition, and the creation of a system based on atomic gases analogue of a mesoscopic conductor and the observation of the onset of superfluidity in this system. Esslinger was awarded a 2000 Philip Morris Research Prize (together with Theodor Hänsch and Immanuel Bloch ) and currently holds an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He is the author of more than 80 technical publications that have been cited more than 8000 times (as of March 2013).