Rate My Professor Florian Schreck

Professor Florian Schreck is Professor of Experimental Quantum Physics in the Physics department at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Science. Born in 1972, he studied physics at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University of Grenoble in France before earning his PhD at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research for two years at the University of Texas in the United States. From 2004 to 2013, Schreck served as a senior researcher at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck, working in the group of Prof. Rudolf Grimm. In 2013, he was appointed to his current position at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads the Strontium Quantum Gases group within the Quantum Gases & Quantum Information cluster at the Institute of Physics. He is also co-founder and CEO of OpticsFoundry B.V., a spin-off company from the University of Amsterdam.

Schreck's research focuses on ultracold quantum gases, particularly with strontium atoms, enabling studies of quantum many-body systems, quantum simulation, and quantum metrology. His team achieved the world's first strontium Bose-Einstein condensate in 2009 and, in 2012, produced a strontium BEC using only laser cooling, a milestone recognized as one of the top 10 physics breakthroughs of 2013 by Physics World. Key publications include 'Continuous Bose–Einstein condensation' (Nature, 2022), 'Observation of Feshbach resonances between alkali and closed-shell atoms' (Nature Physics, 2018), 'Steady-State Magneto-Optical Trap with 100-Fold Improved Phase-Space Density' (Physical Review Letters, 2017), 'Quasipure Bose-Einstein condensate immersed in a Fermi sea' (Physical Review Letters, 2001), and 'Formation of a matter-wave bright soliton' (Science, 2002). His contributions have advanced continuous atom sources, optical clocks, and Rydberg atom arrays for quantum computing. Schreck has received the START Prize in 2010, the highest research award for junior researchers in Austria; an ERC Consolidator Grant of €1.8 million; and the 2024 Physica Prize for his work on Bose-Einstein condensates. He coordinates the QuRIOUS doctoral programme on optical quantum clocks and holds leadership roles in quantum technology initiatives.