Among its most prestigious prizes, the Quantum Electronics and Optics division (QEOD) of the European Physical Society (EPS) distributes the Quantum Electronics and Optics Prizes. These are the two senior EPS/QEOD prizes (one for fundamental, one for applied aspects) awarded for outstanding contributions to quantum electronics and optics. The prizes winners are each to receive a medal and 5000 euros.

Awarded every two years, these prizes recognize the highest level of achievements in fundamental and applied research in optical physics. The awards are presented in a special Plenary Ceremony generally held on Tuesday morning, during the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe (CLEO®/Europe) and the EuropeanQuantum Electronics Conference (EQEC), held in Munich, Germany taking place in uneven years.

Charter

2023 EPS Quantum Electronics Prizes

Applied aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Giulio Cerullo, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, for pioneering and outstanding contributions to the generation of few-cycle light pulses and for their application to the study of primary photoinduced processes in (bio)molecules and nanostructures.


Biography

Giulo Cerullo

Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory. His research activity focuses on the generation of tunable few-optical-cycle light pulses and on their application to the study of primary photoinduced processes in molecules, nanostructures and two-dimensional materials. He has published more than 500 papers which have received over 28000 citations. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, of the European Physical Society, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and past Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He has been General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018 and International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2022. 

Fundamental aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Vahid Sandoghdar, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen, Germany, for ground-breaking research on the efficiency of light-matter interaction in quantum optics and biophysics, leading to single-molecule strong coupling and label-free detection of small proteins.

Biography
Vahid Sandoghdar

Govind P. Agrawal is an expert on nonlinear optics, silicon photonics, and optical communications. He
received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1971 and 1974
respectively. After holding positions at the Ecole Polytechnique, France, the City University of New York, and
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Agrawal joined in 1989 the faculty of the Institute of Optics at University of

Vahid Sandoghdar was born in Tehran, Iran and obtained his B.S. and Ph.D in physics from the University of California in Davis and Yale University. After a postdoc at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he moved to the University of Konstanz in Germany and started a new line of research to combine single molecule spectroscopy, scanning probe microscopy and quantum optics. In 2001, he became full professor at ETH Zurich. In 2011, he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Sandoghdar has pioneered the field of Nano-Optics to investigate and exploit nanometer-scale interaction of light and matter within a broad scope, ranging from quantum optics to biophotonics.

2021 EPS Quantum Electronics Prizes

Fundamental aspects
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The 2021 EPS-QEOD Quantum Electronics Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Prof. Miles Padgett, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, for pioneering and wide ranging research on the fundamentals and applications of optical angular momentum.

Biography
Milmes Padgett

Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and also holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in the UK. His research team, covers all things optical from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us, to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing. They are currently using the classical and quantum properties of light to explore: the laws of quantum physics in accelerating frames, microscopes that see through noise, shaped light that overcomes diffraction-limited resolution and endoscopes the width of a human hair.

2019 EPS Quantum Electronics Prizes

Applied aspects
Agrawal

The 2019 Prize for applied aspects of quantum electronics and optics is awarded to Govind P. Agrawal (University of Rochester, USA), for pioneering and groundbreaking research that underpins a wide range of current photonic technologies in the fields of semiconductor lasers, nonlinear fiber optics and optical communication systems.


Biography

Govind P. Agrawal

Govind P. Agrawal is an expert on nonlinear optics, silicon photonics, and optical communications. He
received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1971 and 1974
respectively. After holding positions at the Ecole Polytechnique, France, the City University of New York, and
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Agrawal joined in 1989 the faculty of the Institute of Optics at University of
Rochester, where he is currently James C. Wyant Professor of Optics. He is an author or coauthor of more than
450 research papers, and eight books. His books on Nonlinear Fiber Optics (Academic Press, 6th ed., 2019) and
Fiber-Optic Communication Systems (Wiley, 4th ed., 2010) are used worldwide for research and teaching. Since
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January 2014, Agrawal serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the OSA journal Advances in Optics and Photonics.
Agrawal is a Fellow of IEEE and OSA (The Optical Society) and a Life Fellow of the Optical Society of India.
He is also a member of the European Physical Society. In 2012, IEEE Photonics Society honoured him with its
Quantum Electronics Award. He received in 2013 Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate
Teaching. Agrawal was given the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal in 2015. He is also the recipient of the 2019
Max Born Award of the OSA.

Fundamental aspects
Huillier

The 2019 Prize for fundamental aspects of quantum electronics and optics is awarded to Anne L'Huillier (Lund University, Sweden), in recognition of her pioneering experimental and theoretical contributions to attosecond pulse trains using high harmonics, which form the basis of today's successful field of attosecond science.

Biography

Anne L'Huillier

Anne L’Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science. She was born in Paris in 1958, studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in mathematics and physics and defended her doctorat d’état ès Sciences Physiques de l’Université Paris VI, in 1986. She was then permanently employed as researcher at the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, in
Saclay, France until 1995. She was postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg (1986), University of Southern California (1988), and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1993). In 1995, she moved to Lund University, Sweden and became full professor in 1997. She was elected to the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences in 2004.

Her research, which includes both theory and experiment, deals with the interaction between atoms and intense laser light, and in particular the generation of high-order harmonics of the laser light, which, in the time domain, consist of trains of attosecond pulses. Currently, her research group works on attosecond source development and optimization as well as on applications, for example, concerning the measurement of photoionization dynamics in atomic systems.

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