Rate My Professor Dirk Bouwmeester

Dirk Bouwmeester is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds a professorial position at Leiden University in the Faculty of Science, Leiden Institute of Physics. He obtained his PhD in 1995 from Leiden University with a thesis on quantum mechanics and classical optics. His postdoctoral research included work at the University of Oxford with Roger Penrose on twisted solutions of Maxwell's equations, followed by research at the University of Innsbruck with Anton Zeilinger, where he contributed to the first experimental demonstration of quantum teleportation, published in Nature in 1997. From 1999 to 2001, he led a research group at the University of Oxford's Centre for Quantum Computation, performing demonstrations of optimal quantum cloning of photon states and stimulated emission of entangled photons. Since 2001, he has been a faculty member at UCSB, initiating projects at the interface of physics, engineering, and biology, including solid-state cavity quantum electrodynamics, knotted states of light, optical cooling and quantum states of micromechanical systems, and DNA-templated optical emitters.

Bouwmeester's research focuses on quantum information science and quantum decoherence using optomechanical systems such as phononic crystal membranes made of silicon nitride and diamond, and on-chip optical waveguides coupled to superfluid helium. At Leiden, his experiments investigate the boundary between the quantum and classical worlds at temperatures just above absolute zero, including the development of a nano-mirror that can be simultaneously in two positions. He received the 2014 NWO Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands, which includes 2.5 million euros for research. Key publications include 'Experimental quantum teleportation' (Nature, 1997), 'Sub-kelvin optical cooling of a micromechanical resonator' (Nature, 2006), 'Linked and knotted beams of light' (Nature Physics, 2008), 'Coherent optomechanical state transfer between disparate mechanical resonators' (Nature Communications, 2017), and co-authorship of the book 'The Physics of Quantum Information: Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Teleportation, Quantum Computation' (2000). His scholarly impact is evidenced by over 28,000 citations on Google Scholar.