Peter E. Toschek

Hamburg University

Theodor Hänsch (doctorate 1969). Toschek completed his habilitation in experimental physics in 1968. In 1972 he became a Professor at Heidelberg. In 1981 he accepted a chair in experimental physics at the University of Hamburg. There he and Günter Huber founded the Institute for Laser Physics in 1989. From 1980 to 1990 Toschek co-edited Optics Communications. Peter Toschek worked at Stanford University with Tony Siegman (1972), at the Laboratoire Aimé Cotton in Orsay, France, (1978/79), and as a Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder

David Wineland and co-workers. After Peter Toschek and Hans Georg Dehmelt having proposed, in 1975, a scheme for the realization and observation of single atomic ions,^[11] Werner Neuhauser, Martin Hohenstatt and Peter Toschek in 1978 demonstrated, for the first time, the trapping and visual observation of a single atom, a Barium ion, which had been cooled by laser light down to a few mK above absolute zero temperature, and confined within a miniature quadrupole ion trap.^[12] This achievement made feasible the manipulation, quantum measurement and spectroscopy of individual atomic ions.^[13] On such quantum objects Toschek and associates observed for the first time and reported in 1986 Niels Bohr's metaphorical "quantum jumps",^[14] simultaneously with and independent of similar observations by Hans Georg Dehmelt and co-workers. Other achievements include the first demonstration of a two-photon laser ^[15] (1981), the quenching of quantum noise (in the difference frequency signal of two laser emission lines) by correlated spontaneous emission (1990),^[16][17] stochastic cooling of single ions (1995),^[18] the observation of the oscillation dynamics of trapped ions ^[19] (1998), atomic interferometry on a single ion (1999) ^[20] and unambiguous evidence of impeded evolution of an unstable quantum system by the system's observation, the Quantum Zeno effect (2000).^[21][22]

Theodor Hänsch, Werner Neuhauser, Ingo Siemers, Ingo Steiner, and Zhang Dao-Zhong

Optical Society of America (OSA). In 2015 he received the Herbert Walther Award