Ataç İmamoğlu

Ataç İmamoğlu (born August 12, 1964) is a Turkish-Swiss physicist working on quantum optics and quantum computation. His academic interests are quantum optics, semiconductor physics, and nonlinear optics. İmamoğlu graduated from TED Ankara College in 1981. He received his BSc in electrical engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University for his work on Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and Lasers without Inversion. He did post-doctoral work on atomic and molecular physics at Harvard University. In 1993, he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1999, he became a professor of electrical engineering and physics. In 2001 he moved to the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Since 2002, he has been working at ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland, where he is heading the research group on Quantum Photonics. His group at ETHZ investigates quantum optics of solid-state zero-dimensional emitters, such as quantum dots or defects, embedded in photonic nano-structures. They are particularly interested in understanding physical properties that distinguish these solid-state systems from their atomic counterparts. Controlling quantum dynamics of quantum dot spins for applications in quantum information processing is one of their principal goals. As of February 2009, he had received ~8600 citations according to the Web of Science.