Pepijn
Pinkse

Pepijn Pinkse (1970) was trained as a physicist at the University of Leiden. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1997 for his thesis on (quantum) optical studies of spin-polarized atomic hydrogen at extremely low temperatures. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Gerhard Rempe at the University of Konstanz in Germany and at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) Garching, Germany. Here he performed seminal experiments, trapping a single atom by a single photon in a high-finesse cavity in the QED strong-coupling regime. Subsequently, his team performed a long series of world-leading experiments in quantum optics. He also pioneered new ways of cooling and trapping ultracold molecules in a project initiated in 2002. In 2008, he obtained his “Habilitation”, the advanced German university lecture qualification, from the TU München.

In 2009 he moved to the University of Twente in the Netherlands, to take the post of Director of the newly established Strategic Research Orientation “Applied Nanophotonics” at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. In 2014 he joined the Complex Photonics Systems (COPS) chair as a professor. There he pioneered, with Boris Skoric and Allard Mosk, Quantum-Secure Authentication (QSA), the quantum-secure readout of a multiple scattering key as so-called Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), a new security primitive. Whereas one of the strengths of Quantum-Secure Authentication is that it works with weak coherent light, Pinkse has recently demonstrated Hong-Ou-Mandel bunching and HOM-like antibunching of single-photon Fock states with beam splitters in multiple-scattering media. Presently he is combining ideas from quantum optics with random-scattering media, multimode fibers and complex integrated photonic circuits.

Currently, he guides the new Adaptive Quantum Optics (AQO) chair that was spun out by COPS; we wish our AQO neighbors best of success in their scientific endeavors!