20th-century technology was dominated by quantum mechanics, which was discovered in 1925 by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Maurice Dirac. The laser, the transistor, and novel magnetic storage devices—which led to a revolution in communications and computing—are just a few examples. However, as early as the late 1990s, a second quantum revolution was already on the horizon, one that has just been recognized by last year’s Nobel Prize awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger. This new technology, which lies at the heart of quantum computing and quantum communication, is based on the phenomenon of entanglement in quantum mechanics. This lecture provides an introduction to the concepts of quantum mechanics that will dominate the quantum technologies of our century.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schleich is a professor of quantum physics at the University of Ulm. He was also the founding director of the Institute for Quantum Technologies at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which he chaired on the Executive Board from 2019 to 2022. He has received numerous awards and honors for his scientific achievements, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Max Planck Research Prize, the Physics Prize of the German Physical Society, and the Otto Hahn Medal. He received the First Class Medal from the Technical University of Prague and the Ernst Abbe Medal. In 2021, he received the Herbert Walther Award. Wolfgang Schleich is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, the Leopoldina National Academy, and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2019, he has been an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Optical Society of America, the European Optical Society, and the American Physical Society.

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