Gerd Leuchs

Gerhard "Gerd" Leuchs (born June 14, 1950) is a German experimental physicist in optics. He is the Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and an adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Ottawa. From 1994-2019 he was a full professor of physics and since 2019 has been a senior professor at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU).

Leuchs holds honorary degrees from the Technical University of Denmark and Saint Petersburg State University. He served as the President of Optica (formerly the Optical Society) in 2024.

Education Leuchs studied physics and mathematics at the University of Cologne from 1970 to 1975 and received his doctorate from LMU Munich in 1978. From 1980 to 1981, Leuchs served as a visiting fellow for the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder, Colorado.

Leuchs served as the Feodor-Lynen Fellow for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Heisenberg Fellow for the German Science Foundation and as a Visiting Professor for the Australian National University.

In 2003, Leuchs' research team demonstrated, for the first time, that a radially polarized field can be focused to a tighter spot size than for standard linear polarization. The electromagnetic field produced by the tightly focused light can be used to manipulate atoms or other small-scale objects.

In 2010, Leuchs' research team, in collaboration with the Université libre de Bruxelles, developed a quantum error correcting code, an early demonstration of error correction achieved at the quanta scale. The correcting code, based on linear optics, protects against the loss of photons for quantum information processing.

Awards and honors 2004: Fellow of Optica 2005: Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize from the European Physical Society 2012: Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany 2016: Foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2018: Herbert Walther Prize from the German Physical Society and Optica 2018: Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art 2023: International Fellow of the Chinese Optical Society

Selected publications