Florian Brandt

Florian received his Bachelor’s (2017) as well as his Master’s (2019) degree in Physics from the University of Vienna in Austria. Since the first moment when he started studying physics, he has been fascinated by Quantum Physics and its peculiar and challenging properties and conclusions. He specialized in Quantum Optics already during his undergraduate Program. His main research interests lie in the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Optics and Photonics as well as Quantum Information Science.  In his Bachelor’s project, he investigated the possibility of generating thermal light from a coherent light source, i.e. a laser. This was part of a project which aims at using thermal light in order to cool down nanoparticles; In marked contrast to laser cooling, where one uses a narrow-band coherent light source in order to couple to the phonons of material in a controlled fashion. During his Master’s, he worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In a very theory-oriented environment, he could deepen his knowledge in Quantum Information Science both on the theoretical as well as on the experimental side. Florian mainly focused on the improvement of current entanglement distribution schemes using high dimensional systems of light. He worked on Quantum Information encodings in the spatial structure of light, one particular – in principle unbounded – degree of freedom that photons give access to. With his work, he wants to render the high-dimensional nature of light beams carrying orbital angular momentum an even more promising candidate for both future Quantum Communication schemes as well as for experiments in the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. During his new adventure as a doctoral candidate (2019) in Prof. Karimi’s group, he wants to further penetrate the most basic and exciting principles of nature while always keeping an eye on possible applications, i.e. Quantum Technology.