Rudolf Grimm
Rudolf Grimm ( born November 10, 1961 in Mannheim) is an experimental physicist in Austria. He deals with ultracold atoms and quantum gases and was able to realize his team as the world's first scientist to a Bose - Einstein condensate of molecules.
Life
Prior to his academic career was Rudolf Grimm guitarist of the NDW band bears and the Milchbubis. At the University of Hannover, he completed a physics degree, which he completed in 1986. From 1986 to 1989 he conducted research as a PhD student at the ETH Zurich and then went for half a year at the Institute of Spectroscopy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Troitsk near Moscow. He then worked for ten years as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. 1994 Grimm habilitated at the University of Heidelberg in experimental physics. In 2000, his appeal was made to the chair of experimental physics at the University of Innsbruck. Here he was from 2005 to 2008 and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, computer science and physics, and since 2006 has been director of the Research Center for Quantum Physics. Since 2003 he is Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information ( IQOQI ) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS ). Rudolf Grimm is married and father of three children. Since 17 December 2007, he has next to the German and the Austrian citizenship.
Work
The experimental physicist deals with Bose - Einstein condensates of atoms and molecules and fermionic quantum gases. 2002 his group completed the world's first production of a Bose -Einstein condensate of cesium atoms. A year later, the team produced the first Bose - Einstein condensate of molecules. 2004, the Innsbruck researchers realized a Fermi condensate. The Science magazine ranked this success among the world's top ten works from all scientific disciplines this year. Grimm was the first time found evidence for the frictionless flow of particles ( superfluidity ) in Fermi condensates in the work on collective vibrational excitations and pairing energies. Meanwhile, physicists led by Rudolf Grimm able to produce more complex molecules in ultracold quantum gases. 2006 succeeded the first experimental observation of Efimov states that the Russian Vitaly Efimov had predicted theoretically the early 1970s. Currently (2007) Grimm works intensively on mixed condensates of atoms of different elements.
Awards
For his scientific achievements Rudolf Grimm has already won a number of awards. He received in 2005 the highest Austrian science award, the Wittgenstein Prize. In the same year he was elected by the Austrian daily newspaper "Die Presse " to the " Austrian of the Year 2005" in the field of research. Earlier, he was awarded the Gerhard -Hess - Award of the German Research Foundation ( 1996) and the silver medal of the ETH Zurich (1989). Just recently, the Beller Lectureship Award of the American Physical Society (APS ) awarded him. Since 2006, Rudolf Grimm is member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he was awarded the Tyrolean State Prize for Science. In 2009, he was Scholar of the Year in Austria.