About Daqing
Daqing Wang leads a young research group at the Institute of Applied Physics. Since October 2023, he has held a tenure-track professorship within the environment of the Excellence Cluster ML4Q. Before coming to Bonn, Daqing worked through several productive years at the University of Kassel, first as a postdoc, then as a junior PI, and eventually as a tenure-track professor. His academic roots go back to Wuhan, where he completed his bachelor’s studies at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. A generous scholarship from the Abbe School of Photonics enabled him to move to the University of Jena for an M.Sc. in Photonics. He carried out his master’s thesis in the group of Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna, and finally moved to Erlangen and to the then newly founded Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, where he completed his PhD thesis with Vahid Sandoghdar on single-molecule cavity QED.
What Daqing likes most in physics is when light and an atom or a molecule "really see" each other. Much of his work has been about making such interactions as clean, coherent, and controllable as possible. Along the way, he has worked in various subfields of experimental quantum optics and atomic and molecular physics. Together with his colleagues, he has used single trapped ions as ultrasensitive sensors to detect tiny forces at the zeptonewton level, developed methods for imaging and tracking single molecules in ultrahigh-vacuum environments, and converted single organic molecules into nearly ideal two-level systems by coupling them to high-finesse microcavities. Earlier in the career, he had the honor to be part of the 143-km quantum teleportation experiment, which he still likes to tell students about because it shows how far photons can really go.
He has been fortunate that some of this work has been recognized, among others, with the Dissertation Prize of the German Physical Society, the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad, and an ERC Starting Grant in 2022. He is also a PI in the Excellence Cluster ML4Q and in the Collaborative Research Center ELCH.
In addition, Daqing contributes to graduate training in Bonn and through the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School. And his life is not only optics and vacuum chambers: he is married, has two children, and tries (with mixed success) to keep a balance between physics and a normal family rhythm.
