Quantum optics and nanophotonics researcher Mikhail Lukin is the winner of this year's Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics.

Lukin is a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Presented by the academic publisher Springer Nature, the $5,000 award will be presented in Berlin, where Lukin will also give a public lecture.

According to Springer, Lukin is a pioneer in the use of quantum optical processes and devices for implementing the ideas of quantum information science. His work in both theoretical and experimental physics has resulted in new methods for controlling the propagation of light fields and for manipulating individual atoms by shaping light-matter interaction at the single-particle level.

Lukin received his early education from the Moscow Institute of Technology and Physics. He completed his doctorate at Texas A&M University in 1998. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at Harvard University in 1998, and joined the faculty of the Harvard physics department in 2001, becoming a professor there in 2004. He has coauthored more than 300 technical papers and has received a number of distinguished awards.

The Julius Springer Prize has been awarded annually since 1998 by the editors-in-chief of the Springer journals Applied Physics A — Materials Science & Processing and Applied Physics B — Lasers and Optics.