Pierre Jobez has joined the CQED team as a postdoc. Pierre did his PhD at the Université de Genève in Nicolas Gisin's group. His topic was the development of a solid-state quantum memory with millisecond storage time and high efficiency. In our group, he will be working as a postdoc on the fiber cavity project.

Florian Kranzl has joined the Cavity QED team as a master student. He has studied physics in Innsbruck and will now work on the Fibercavity project. He will improve the annealing of fibre-based cavities as well as their characterization.

Helene Hainzer has joined the PhiNet team as a master student. She has studied in Innsbruck and will now work on her master thesis. She will set up a new reference cavity for the transfer lock of the new PhiNet cavity-QED setup.

Viktor has recently joined our group. He got his masters and PhD degrees from the Department of Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia. His research was focussed on the application of nonlinear optics for studying nanostructures. After finishing his thesis, titled "Magnetization-induced effects in optical and nonlinear-optical response of metallic nanoparticles", he has now joined the PhiNet-team to work on quantum interfaces and frequency conversion.

Last week Rainer Blatt received in Singapore the Quantum Communication Award 2016 for his pioneering experiments on quantum information processing with trapped ions and photons. Artur Ekert from the National University of Singapore was the second awardee of this prize. Congratulations Rainer!

Vojtěch has recently completed his master’s program in optics and optoelectronics at the Department of Optics, Faculty of Science, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. During his master’s work he studied the application of liquid crystal modules to perform rapidly reconfigurable polarisation measurements of light. In Innsbruck, Vojtěch has joined the PhiNet team as a PhD student and will be working on techniques to integrate trapped ions into quantum networks.

Tiffany has just completed her master's at the University of Oxford. She was working with Ian Walmsley and Stefanie Barz on entangling photons in their polarization degree of freedom using integrated photonic technology. Such fused silica chips with written waveguides were used to implement non-deterministic controlled-phase gates of two photons. In Innsbruck, Tiffany will work together with the Quantum Information and Quantum Simulations team.

Physicists in Innsbruck have realized the first quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories, building a bridge between high-energy theory and atomic physics. In the journal Nature, Rainer Blatt's and Peter Zoller's research teams describe how they simulated the creation of elementary particle pairs out of the vacuum by using a quantum computer.

Tracy is one of the recipients of the 2016 START-Preis, the highest Austrian award for young scientists. Congratulations!