Keynote Lectures

Brief Bio
Jean-Jacques Greffet received his PhD in solid state physics in 1988 from Université Paris-Sud. He is a professor at Institut d'Optique, Université Paris-Saclay and a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France. He made several contributions to light scattering of electromagnetic waves and to the theory of near-field microscopy. He then explored the role of surface phonon polaritons to modify near-field radiative heat transfer and discovered coherent thermal emission. He contributed to the field of nanoantennas to control lifetime and directional emission of quantum emitters. His current research interests deals with revisiting fundamental quantum optics experiments with surface plasmons (wave-particle duality, Hong Ou Mandel experiment, photon-plasmon entanglement, electrical emission by tunnel effect) and controlling light-matter interaction at the nanoscale using resonators and collective effects. He is an OSA fellow and the recipient of the Servant prize of the french Academy of Science.

Brief Bio
Professor Gershon Kurizki joined the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) in 1985, where he became tenured Professor in 1991. He holds the G.W. Dunne Professorial Chair in Quantum Optics at WIS since 1998. His fields of international renown include Quantum Thermodynamics and Control of Open Quantum-Systems; Quantum Optics and Quantum Light-Matter Interactions. He has published over 60 high-profile articles (Phys.Rev.Letters, Nature and PNAS) out of 250 publications thus far (h-index: 56; i-10 index: 162, 11000 citations). He has delivered over 250 invited and plenary talks at international conferences/ workshops so far. His recognition includes: the Optical Society of America Fellowship (since 1999); the American Physical Society (APS) Fellowship (since 2002); the UK Institute of Physics Fellowship (since 2004); the Lamb Award in Laser Physics and Quantum Optics (2008); the Humboldt-Meitner Award in Atomic Physics (2009). He publishes philosophical essays and poetry and has written a popular science book (“The Quantum Matrix” Oxford Univ. Press (2020)). Kurizki’s research on the control of open quantum systems, their bath-induced interactions and thermodynamic aspects has yielded a number of groundbreaking discoveries, supported by experiment, that have impacted diverse fields and deepened our understanding of quantum system-bath interactions. One intriguing insight is that “the bath is more a friend than a foe”: it can be a probe, a diagnostic tool or a resource of quantumness. His discoveries have been recognized by his APS Fellow citation (2002): "For discovering innovative approaches to the control of the quantum properties of fields interacting with matter"; the Lamb Award citation (2008): "For his discovery of the anti-Zeno effect and his pioneering contributions to the theory of quantum measurements and decoherence control in quantum open systems " and the Meitner- Humboldt Award laudatio (2009): “In recognition of his exceptional achievements in quantum optics, his ground-breaking contributions to the control of decoherence and his pioneering investigations of the Zeno and anti-Zeno effects in quantum open systems as links between the quantum and classical pictures of the world."