Wolfgang Tittel

I am an experimental physicist specialized in (quantum) optics and quantum communications, a former professor and Industrial Research Chair at the University of Calgary, a professor at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology, and since January 2023 a full professor at the University off Geneva.

I have engaged in groundbreaking research in quantum communication from the early stages of this field on, i.e. with the start of my MSc project in 1994. My work stretches across many topics within atomic and optical physics, and was seminal in bringing this promising application of quantum information processing out of the laboratory and into the real world, thereby raising attention and appreciation that the required technology is not restricted to controlled laboratory settings. I have published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal papers, cited in total more than 23 000 times, many of which contributed an important advance to the scientific discipline and influenced further developments. For instance, the “plug&play” QKD system, which I co-developed as a PhD student, was subsequently commercialized by idQuantique, the American Physical Society selected the distribution of entangled photons over ten kilometers of deployed fibres (which I also did as a PhD student) in their review “A century of physics” to be a “Highlight 1997”, and the first field demonstration of “Measurement-Device Independent Quantum Key Distribution” (performed as a Professor at the University of Calgary) to belong to the most important achievements in 2013. Moreover, our 2011 paper on the storage of members from entangled photon pairs in a rare-earth-doped crystal, and the 2016 demonstration of quantum teleportation across a metropolitan fibre network (both performed as a Professor) received media coverage all over the world.

I have presented invited papers at some of the most important conferences in my field, and I have given many public talks, including at TEDxYYC . I have been a founding member of QCRYPT the annual international quantum cryptography conference--and have secured funding in excess of the equivalence of EU 17M. 13 PhD students and many MSc students have graduated under my guidance, and I have trained many post-doctoral fellows several of which have now become university professors themselves.

Outside work I spend my time with my family, and I also do a lot of sports. After a 20-year-long career in gymnastics I competed internationally for Germany and also coached a junior tea. I now enjoy climbing and skiing both cross-country and down-hill.