Maciej Lewenstein (born September 21, 1955 in Warsaw), is a Polish theoretical physicist, currently an ICREA professor at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels near Barcelona. He is an author of over 480 scientific articles and 2 books, and recipient of many international and national prizes. In addition to quantum physics his other passion is music, and jazz in particular. His collection of compact discs and vinyl records includes over 9000 items.
Education
Maciej Lewenstein was born on 21 September 1955. He graduated at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Warsaw University in 1978, with his diploma thesis about the superradiance phenomenon written under the supervision of Prof. . After one year of working as a scientific assistant at the ITP of Warsaw University, he joined in 1979 the new Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (CFT), newly formed by Prof. Iwo Białynicki-Birula. At CFT he started his PhD studies on applications of functional integration methods in quantum optics with Prof. K. Rzążewski. In 1981 he became a DAAD stipend holder at the Essen University. There, he completed his thesis under the joint supervision of Prof. Fritz Haake in 1983 with summa cum laude and the Prize of the University. In the years 1984-1986 he spent long term visits as a postdoc at Essen University with Prof. Haake working on statistical physics of disordered systems. After returning to Poland and becoming a faculty member of the CFT, he habilitated in 1986 at the Institute of Physics in Warsaw with a thesis on cavity quantum electrodynamics and intense laser-matter interactions.
Research career
After habilitating, he was for three years a research associate to the Nobel laureate Roy J. Glauber at Harvard University. In the beginning of the nineties he continued to extend his collaborations on quantum optics of dielectric media and cavity quantum electrodynamics with Prof. R. Glauber, as well as Prof. T. Mossberg (Eugene, Oregon). Due to his interdisciplinary interest in applications of physics in neurosciences and social sciences, he has become an associated member of the Institute of Social Sciences at the Warsaw University (ISS), and developed collaborations with Profs. A Nowak and B. Latané (ISS/Boca Raton). In 1992 he spent a six-month sabbatical at the Service de Photons, Atomes et Molécules (SPAM) of the Commisariat a l’Energie Atomique in Saclay. There he started his investigations of the foundations of the atto-second physics and harmonic generation together with Prof. A. L’Huillier. In 1993 he spent a year as a visiting fellow at Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at Boulder, where he continued the work on atto-second physics, but initiated also his interests in physics of ultra-cold atoms and quantum information, running a joint Bose-Einstein Condensation seminar together with Profs. P. Zoller and E. Cornell (Nobel 2001). In 1994 he spent six months at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, continuing studies of ultra-cold gases with R. Glauber.
In 1995 he joined the faculty of the SPAM CEA in Saclay, where he spent 3.5 years dividing his interest between physics of ultra-intense laser-matter interactions, atto-second physics, physics of ultra-cold gases and quantum information. In 1998 he became a full professor at the Leibniz University Hannover, where he remained until 2005. In 2005 he moved to Spain as ICREA professor to lead the quantum optics theory group at the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques (ICFO) in Castelldefels.