Rudolf Grimm

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Rudolf Grimm (born 10 November 1961 in Mannheim, Germany) is a professor of experimental physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and scientific director at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research is focused on ultracold atomic quantum gases. In fall 2002, his team created the first Bose-Einstein condensate of caesium atoms. In summer 2003, the group reported on the creation of a pure molecular quantum gas of cesium dimers and, in November 2003, on the first Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules (simultaneously with Deborah S. Jin's group at JILA, Boulder). In 2004, his research team performed a series of key experiments on the superfluidity of Fermi gases: the reversible crossover from a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas, studies of collective excitation modes, and the observation of the pairing gap of a fermionic superfluid. In 2005, he received the Wittgenstein Award, the highest scientific award in Austria. In 2006, his group provided experimental evidence of an Efimov quantum state, a long-predicted three-body resonance, in a gas of ultracold caesium atoms.