Fedor Jelezko and Jörg Wrachtrup are the winners of the prestigious ZEISS Research Award in 2016.
They have been honoured for their outstanding work on quantum technology with optically addressable spins in diamond. The award will be presented within the framework of the ZEISS Symposium that will take place for the first time on 23 June 2016 in the ZEISS Forum in Oberkochen. During this event international experts will conduct discussions and identify trends and requirements in the fields of optics and photonics that are being strongly influenced and changed by the increasing level digitization in the modern world. These include, for example, computational imaging, computer vision and machine learning, large data in optics, and virtual and augmented reality.
The ZEISS Research Award will be presented every two years and has been allocated prize money totaling 40,000 euros. The selected candidates should have already demonstrated outstanding achievements in the field of optics or photonics. They should still be actively conducting research, and their work should offer major potential for gaining further knowledge and enabling practical applications.
Initiated and funded by Carl Zeiss AG, the ZEISS Research Award is the successor to the Carl Zeiss Research Award that honored outstanding achievements in optical research every two years from 1990 onward. It was advertised by the Ernst Abbe Fund and was allocated prize money of 25,000 euros on its most recent presentation. 20 winners received the prize in a total of 13 award ceremonies.
Starting in 2016, independently of the ZEISS Research Award, the Ernst Abbe Fund in the Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany will present a research award with a new focus: the Carl Zeiss Award for Young Researchers. This will also be presented at the ZEISS Symposium. The winners in 2016 are:
•Robert Brückner, Institute for Applied Photo Physics (IAPP), Technical University of Dresden, Germany
•Georg Heinze, Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Barcelona, Spain
•Robert Keil, Institute for Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck, Austria