Maciej Lewenstein


Maciej Lewenstein, is a Polish theoretical physicist, currently an ICREA professor at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels near Barcelona.

Education

Maciej Lewenstein was born on 21 September 1955. He graduated at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Warsaw in 1978, with his diploma thesis about the superradiance phenomenon written under the supervision of. After one year of working as a scientific assistant at the ITP of University of Warsaw, he joined in 1979 the new Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, newly formed by Prof. Iwo Białynicki-Birula. At CFT he started his PhD studies on applications of functional integration methods in quantum optics with Prof. K. Rzążewski. In 1981 he became a DAAD stipend holder at the Essen University. There, he completed his thesis under the joint supervision of Fritz Haake in 1983 with summa cum laude and the Prize of the University.
In the years 1984-1986 he spent visits as a postdoc at Essen University with Haake working on statistical physics of disordered systems. After returning to Poland and becoming a faculty member of the CFT, he habilitated in 1986 at the Institute of Physics in Warsaw with a thesis on cavity quantum electrodynamics and intense laser-matter interactions.

Research career

After habilitating, he was for three years a research associate to the Nobel laureate Roy J. Glauber at Harvard University. In the beginning of the nineties he continued to extend his collaborations on quantum optics of dielectric media and cavity quantum electrodynamics with R. Glauber, as well as T. Mossberg. He was an associated member of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw, and developed collaborations with A Nowak and B. Latané. In 1992 he spent a six-month sabbatical at the Service de Photons, Atomes et Molécules of the Commisariat a l’Energie Atomique in Saclay. There he started his investigations of the foundations of the atto-second physics and harmonic generation together with A. L’Huillier. In 1993 he spent a year as a visiting fellow at Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at Boulder, where he continued the work on atto-second physics, but initiated also his interests in physics of ultra-cold atoms and quantum information, running a joint Bose-Einstein Condensation seminar together with P. Zoller and E. Cornell. In 1994 he spent six months at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, continuing studies of ultra-cold gases with R. Glauber.
In 1995 he joined the faculty of the SPAM CEA in Saclay, where he spent 3.5 years dividing his interest between physics of ultra-intense laser-matter interactions, atto-second physics, physics of ultra-cold gases and quantum information. In 1998 he became a full professor at the Leibniz University Hannover, where he remained until 2005. In 2005 he moved to Spain as ICREA professor to lead the quantum optics theory group at the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques (ICFO) in Castelldefels.

Publications

Lewenstein is author of over 800 publications and two books:
Polish Jazz Recordings and Beyond Maciej Lewenstein Warszawska Firma Wydawnicza
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices: Simulating quantum many-body systems Maciej Lewenstein, Anna Sanpera, and Veronica Ahufunger, Oxford University Press.

Community service

He served as division associate editor of Physical Review Letters from 1997 to 2003. He is on the editorial board of Open Systems and Information Dynamics and Reports on Progress in Physics. He was the chairman of the Quantum Optics and Photonics Division of the German Physical Society from 2004 to 2006.

Awards