Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain

Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have been used to test many of the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement and teleportation, and are a useful resource for quantum information processing.

Herbert Walther was a leader in the fields of quantum optics and laser physics. He was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. He also was Chair of Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is primarily known for his experimental work on cavity quantum electrodynamics as well his groundbreaking work on the ion trap.

Immanuel Bloch is a German experimental physicist. His research is focused on the investigation of quantum many-body systems using ultracold atomic and molecular quantum gases. Bloch is known for his work on atoms in artificial crystals of light, optical lattices, especially the first realization of a quantum phase transition from a weakly interacting superfluid to a strongly interacting Mott insulating state of matter.

The John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications was established in 2009, funded and managed by the University of Toronto, Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control (CQIQC). Named after John Stewart Bell, it is awarded every odd-numbered year, for significant contributions relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics and to the applications of these principles – this covers, but is not limited to, quantum information theory, quantum computation, quantum foundations, quantum cryptography and quantum control. The selection committee has included Gilles Brassard, Peter Zoller, Alain Aspect, John Preskill, and Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, in addition to previous winners Sandu Popescu, Michel Devoret and Nicolas Gisin.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards respond to the knowledge map of the present age. As well as the fundamental knowledge that is at their core, they address developments in information and communication technologies, and interactions between biology and medicine, ecology and conservation biology, climate change, economics, humanities and social sciences, and, finally, contemporary musical creation and performance. Specific categories are reserved for developing knowledge fields of critical relevance to confront central challenges of the 21st century, as in the case of the two environmental awards.

The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) is a research facility established in the context of the Universities Excellence Initiative by the German Federal and State Governments. The multidisciplinary and interinstitutional cluster is located at Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, and has been initiated on 1 November 2012. The funding with more than €25 million by the German Research Foundation will run until 31. December 2018. Scientific teams cooperating in the cluster come from the Universität Hamburg, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), the European XFEL GmbH (XFEL), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD). A full application for a second research period of seven years was handed in at the end of 2017 to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for discussion. After the successful application in 2018, the new cluster “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” started in 2019.

Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics (NQP) Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Christine Silberhorn is a German physicist specialising in quantum optics, full professor at the Paderborn University. In 2011, Silberhorn was awarded the Leibniz Prize and was the youngest recipient of the 2.5 million Euro prize at that time.

Barbara Kraus ) is an Austrian physicist specializing in quantum information, quantum entanglement, and quantum key distribution. She is a University Professor at the TUM School of Natural Sciences at the Technical University of Munich.

Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.