Hartmut Häffner's main research interests focus on trapped ions to get a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. Using laser light, strings of ions trapped with electrodynamical forces can be cooled to their motional ground state. Furthermore, the ions' internal electronic states can be initialized, manipulated and measured with high accuracy. This high degree of control offers exciting prospects to investigate quantum information processing with trapped ions.
Häffner received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Mainz, Germany in 2000. After short periods as a Postdoctoral fellow in Mainz and Bangalore,India, he received a Feodor-Lynen fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation Germany and went to NIST,Gaithersburg as a guest researcher (2000-2001). In 2001 he moved to the University of Innsbruck, Austria as a university assistant where he held a Marie-Curie fellowship from the European Union from 2002 - 2004. From 2004 till 2009 he worked as senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck and won in 2006 the START-award of the Austrian ministry for education to build up his own research group. Since 2009 he has been assistant professor of physics at the UC Berkeley and is also affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.