In addition to C. Keitel, Franco Nori and Eric Van Stryland will also be awarded the prize. The award honors the American physics Nobel laureate Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. who laid essential foundations in numerous fields of physics and technology and, above all, made groundbreaking discoveries in quantum electrodynamics with the discovery of the Lamb shift. Among previous laureates are numerous outstanding personalities in physics. Researchers well known to the Institute, such as Paul Corkum, Olga Kocharovskaya, Mikhail Lukin, Gerald Mourou, and Peter Zoller, among others, received the award in previous years.
C. Keitel is awarded the prize for his pioneering contributions to the interaction between high-power laser fields and matter. He has been head of the department "Theoretical Quantum Dynamics and Quantum Electrodynamics " at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics since 2004.