Anton Zeilinger

Nobel Laureate and Optica Fellow, Anton Zeilinger, professor of Physics emeritus at the University of Vienna, is an Austrian quantum physicist. Zeilinger has pioneered quantum mechanics through theoretical and experimental work on entanglement, most notably his demonstration of quantum teleportation in 1997.

In 1998, his group was also the first to experimentally demonstrate entanglement swapping—the teleportation of an entangled state between qubits, a critical mechanism for quantum computation networks.

Zeilinger was awarded the inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics in 2008, recognizing "his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information." He has received many other awards, including the Wolf Prize in 2010, and the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. Learn more: Anton Zeilinger.

On 4 October 2022, Zeilinger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Alain Aspect and John F. Clauser, for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.