The jury of the Bose-Einstein Conference Series awarded Prof. Rudolf Grimm, Director at the ÖAW Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck and Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, with the BEC Senior Award 2021. Grimm received the award together with Tilman Esslinger from ETH Zurich “for his pioneering work on Feshbach resonances, BEC-BCS crossover physics as well as few-body phenomena such as Efimov states”. With his team, he was the first in the world to create a Bose-Einstein condensate of cesium atoms, a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules and a Fermi condensate. In recent years, Grimm realized numerous physical phenomena in ultracold quantum gases for the first time, such as the Efimov states, which the Russian theorist Vitali Efimov had predicted over three decades earlier.
The awards ceremony took place at the BEC conference in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a prestigious biennial conference attended by scientists from around the world since the first discovery of Bose-Einstein condensates. The BEC Awards were established in 2011 to recognize outstanding research in the experimental and theoretical physics of quantum degenerate atomic gases and are sponsored by the laser company TOPTICA Photonics. This year's winner of the BEC Junior Award is Martin Zwierlein from MIT. The Lifetime Award was given to Jason Ho from Ohio State University.
Rudolf Grimm was born in Mannheim, Germany, and studied physics at the University of Hannover. After working at the ETH Zurich, at the Institute for Spectroscopy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Troitsk near Moscow and at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Rudolf Grimm was appointed to succeed Anton Zeilinger at the University of Innsbruck in 2000. For his achievements, Rudolf Grimm has already received many awards. In 2005, for example, he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize, the country's highest scientific honor, and in 2008 he received the Tyrolean State Prize for Science. In 2009, Grimm was named Scientist of the Year. In 2018, he received the Faddeev Medal together with Vitali Efimov.