The 2008 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics
Awarded January 9, 2008, at the 38th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics.
Wolfgang Schleich, Universität Ulm
For his work on interference in phase space, quantum state engineering and dynamical localization.
Professor Dr. rer. nat., Dr. rer. nat. habil. Wolfgang P. Schleich, born in 1957, enjoys working in the field of theoretical quantum optics with particular emphasis on cross-disciplinary questions. He has obtained his Diploma in physics, his doctorate and his Habilitation from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1981, 1984 and 1989 respectively. At the moment he is head of the Institute of Quantum Physics at the Universität Ulm and also Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the University of North Texas in Denton (USA).
While at the universities of New Mexico, Albuquerque, of Texas at Austin and the Max-Planck Institut für Quantenoptik, Garching he has collaborated with world leaders in physics such as M. O. Scully, J. A. Wheeler and H. Walther. He has published more than 250 papers on problems of quantum optics, foundations of quantum mechanics and general relativity and is the author of the highly acclaimed textbook Quantum Optics in Phase Space. Here he has promoted an approach towards quantum optics based on the Wigner function. At the moment he is editor of the journal Optics Communications, and co-editor of the journals Fortschritte der Physik and New Journal of Physics. Moreover, for 6 years he has been Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters.
For his work he has received numerous awards and honors, including the Otto-Hahn-Medal of the Max-Planck Society (1983), the Prize of the German Physical Society (1991), the Ernst Abbe Medal of the International Commission for Optics (1993), the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation (1995), the Max Planck Award (2002), the Silver Medal of the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague (2005), and the Medal of Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague, First Class (2007). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the European Optical Society, the Institute of Physics, and the Optical Society of America and has been elected as a member of several academies, such as the Leopoldina, the Heidelberg Academy of Science, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.