Immanuel Bloch, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and one of MQV’s leading scientist, is one of the two 2026 Wolf Prize laureates in Physics. The Wolf Foundation honored Bloch and US physicist Jun Ye, who share the prize, “for transformative, widely applicable advances in the control of ultracold atomic systems”.
Bloch’s research has led to major breakthroughs in our ability to control individual atoms. Today, ultracold atoms trapped in optical lattices are a powerful and highly controllable platform for simulating and investigating complex quantum systems. Many physical phenomena, such as chemical bonding in large molecules, magnetism, or superconductivity, involve so many interacting particles that classical computers can model them only to a limited extent. Using neutral atoms trapped with laser light, researchers can create artificial quantum systems to simulate these phenomena. This gives new insights into the structure of many-body quantum states but also lays experimental groundwork for neutral-atom quantum computers. In the words of the Wolf Foundation, Bloch’s work “defined the paradigm of quantum simulation and has had a lasting impact across modern physics and emerging quantum technologies”.
The Wolf Prize has been awarded to outstanding researchers and artists since 1978. Its scientific categories are physics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, and agriculture. The prize carries an award of US$100,000 in each field.