Professor Rainer Blatt is a German-Austrian experimental physicist internationally renowned for his pioneering work in quantum optics, quantum metrology, and quantum information science. He studied physics at the University of Mainz, where he received his degree in 1979 and completed his doctorate in 1981 under Günter Werth. Supported by a DFG fellowship, Blatt worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder, Colorado, with Nobel Laureate John L. Hall. Subsequent appointments took him to the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Hamburg, where he habilitated in experimental physics in 1988. After a Heisenberg Fellowship, he became Professor of Physics at the University of Göttingen in 1994 and, a year later, accepted a chair in Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck. Since 2003, he has also served as Scientific Director of Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) Innsbruck.
Blatt’s research centers on using trapped ions to explore and harness the principles of quantum mechanics. His group pioneered quantum state control, realizing one of the first demonstrations of quantum teleportation between atoms, published in Nature in 2004. Subsequent milestones include the controlled entanglement of up to 14 ions, the creation of the first “quantum byte,” and the implementation of quantum logic gates, quantum error correction, and large-scale ion-based quantum simulators. His team now routinely operates systems with 20–50 fully controlled qubits, advancing the scalability of quantum computation and precision metrology.
A strong advocate for young scientists, many of Blatt‘s former students now hold professorships worldwide. Blatt has received numerous honors, including the Herbert Walther Prize (2023), Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art (2022), Micius Quantum Prize (2018), John Stewart Bell Prize (2015), and Stern–Gerlach Medal (2012). He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Leopoldina, and a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences.
