Rate My Professor Stefan Ulmer

Stefan Ulmer is a particle physicist and professor of physics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Born in 1977 in Tübingen, he studied physics at Heidelberg University, where he earned his diploma in 2006 and completed his PhD in 2011 with a thesis on the first observation of spin flips with a single proton stored in a cryogenic Penning trap. In 2022, he was appointed W3 Professor of Experimental Physics: Quantum Technologies and Fundamental Symmetries at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He serves as founder and spokesperson of the BASE collaboration at CERN and as chief scientist at the Ulmer Fundamental Symmetries Laboratory at RIKEN in Japan. He is also co-director of the Max Planck-RIKEN-PTB Center for Time, Constants and Fundamental Symmetries.

Ulmer’s research focuses on high-precision measurements of antimatter properties using Penning trap techniques to test fundamental symmetries such as CPT invariance. His team has achieved record measurements of the proton-antiproton charge-to-mass ratio and the antiproton magnetic moment, along with the first observation of single antiproton spin transitions and the first transport of antiprotons. These advances have yielded stringent limits on dark matter interactions and contributed to the development of antimatter qubits. He received the IUPAP Young Scientist Award in Fundamental Metrology in 2014 and the Falling Walls Award in Physical Sciences in 2022. Ulmer has published extensively in leading journals including Nature and Physical Review Letters.