5 January 2016

After being Junior Professor at RWTH Aachen, Norbert Schuch has come back to the MPQ in Munich as a professor in the theory division. His group there focuses on Entanglement in Quantum Many-Body Systems. In his group, quantum information methods are applied to the systematic study of strongly correlated systems, with three main goals: First, to classify the possible phases of strongly correlated systems, this is, the distinct types of global entanglement. Second, to study specific strongly correlated systems by means of tailored variational wavefunctions. Third, fundamental limitations are studied to the understanding of these systems imposed by quantum complexity theory. An important tool in his group's study is the description of many-body states in terms of tensor networks.

After being a post-doctoral researcher in prestigious institutions such as TUM, Harvard University and the University of Innsbruck, Matthias Punk is now an Assistant Professor for Theoretical Solid-State Physics at the LMU. His research is focused on properties of strongly correlated quantum matter. In his group, he is interested in identifying, characterizing, and classifying novel quantum phases of matter giving rise to striking phenomena such as high-Tc superconductivity.

Michael Knap is the leader of a new young and dynamic group that will be launched in July 2015 at the Department of Physics, Technische Universität München (TUM). Focusing on theoretical quantum many-body physics, the group will study collective quantum dynamics. Its research will cluster around a broad range of questions from condensed matter theory and will also extend connections to other fields such as quantum optics, atomic physics, quantum information, and computational sciences.

Robert König has been recently hired as an assistant professor at the IAS & Zentrum Mathematik of the TUM. He has previously been an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, and worked as a post-doc in prestigious institutions such as the IBM Watson Research Center, and the California Institute of Technology. His group is devoted to the fields of quantum communication theory and cryptography, quantum information processing, topological quantum computation, and many-body physics and variational methods. In general, its research is centered around operational problems related to the storage, manipulation and transmission of quantum information.