After completing his Ph.D. in physics at
Aarhus University in 1990, Klaus Mølmer held a postdoctoral fellowship at the
Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, supported by the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He returned to Aarhus University in 1991 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2000. In 2022, he joined the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen as a professor of physics. Over the course of his career, Mølmer also held visiting professorships at institutions including
Université Paris-Sud in
France and the
University of Innsbruck in
Austria. Mølmer’s research spans theoretical quantum optics, atomic physics, and quantum information science. He has made contributions to the understanding of open quantum systems, measurement theory, and conditional dynamics, including the development of the
Monte Carlo wavefunction method, a widely used technique for simulating quantum systems subject to dissipation and continuous measurement. Together with Anders Sørensen, he proposed the
Mølmer–Sørensen gate, a two-qubit entangling operation for trapped-ion quantum computers that is robust against motional heating. This gate removed a major experimental obstacle and quickly became a standard tool in ion-trap quantum computing, adopted in laboratories worldwide and implemented in commercial quantum computing platforms. Mølmer has often been recognized as one of the leading voices in Danish and international quantum physics. His theoretical methods and proposals have become textbook material in the fields of quantum optics and quantum information, and his work has influenced both foundational research and applied quantum technologies. Over the course of his career he received numerous awards, some of which include the EliteForsk Award (2007), the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2023), the Dirac Medal (2023), and the Carlsberg Foundation Research Prize (2025). He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008). == Awards ==