(October 4, 2005) Dr. Theodor Hänsch, the director of the Garching-based Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and a professor at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians University, has won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Honored for his "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", Hänsch was born in 1941, and received his doctorate in 1969. For the next 17 years, he researched and taught at Stanford, where he was named California's researcher of the year. In a prime example of the 'brain gain', Hänsch returned to Germany in 1986. Over the last two decades, he has played a major role in launching the 'photon revolution', in which light, not electricity, is the prime tool of measurement, work, scientific investigation and transport of information.
Hänsch joins a long list of Nobel Prize laureates who studied, researched and taught in Munich. The list includes such illustrious names as Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Werner Heisenberg, Adolf Butenandt, Feodor Lynen, Rudolf Mößbauer, Erwin Neher, Gerd Binnig, Klaus von Klitzing and Wolfgang Ketterle.