The science of invisibility | Ulf Leonhardt | TEDxBrussels

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. The science of invisibility

Ulf Leonhardt joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as Professor of Physics in November 2012 after a distinguished international career. He received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2013. Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied physics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, at Moscow State University and at Humboldt University Berlin where he received his PhD in 1993. From 2000 until his appointment at the Weizmann Institute in 2012, he was the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Ulf Leonhardt also had various visiting positions: in 2008 he was a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore and in 2011 at the University of Vienna; in 2012/13 he was an adjunct professor at South China Normal University.

He is the first from former East Germany to win the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006 Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy business and research leaders for his work on invisibility devices. In 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2009 a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012 he received a thousand-talent award of China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He enjoys imaginative research that connects the practical aspects of physics with abstract ideas, thoughts and stories. He loves to find and use unusual and often unused connections across several areas of physics. In particular, he is interested in connections between quantum optics and general relativity. In addition to his theoretical work, he is also running an experiment where the tools of ultrafast photonics are used to make analogues of the event horizon in the laboratory.

In 2012, Prof. Leonhardt received a European Research Council grant to support his research on “Transformation optics: cloaking, perfect imaging and horizons”.

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