H. Dieter Zeh

Heinz-Dieter Zeh (; 8 May 1932 – 15 April 2018) was theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of the University of Heidelberg. He is known for formalizing the theory of quantum decoherence.

Education and career H. Dieter Zeh was born in Braunschweig and studied physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and nuclear physics at the University of Heidelberg as a student of J. Hans D. Jensen. At Heidelberg, he also investigated alpha particle formation in nuclei with and Zeh investigated the topic for his PhD thesis as a student of Mang. Between 1964 and 1965, Zeh was a research assistant at California Institute of Technology and in 1965 and between 1967 and 1968 at the University of California, San Diego. He later became a professor in Heidelberg.

Research Zeh is known for his work concerning quantum decoherence, described formally in his seminal 1970 paper.

Zeh also dedicated a large part of his work to quantum gravity. In 1986, he argued that gravity assumes classical properties due to environmental degrees of freedom, such as the presence of gravitational waves.