Otfried Gühne

Also known as Otfried Guehne, Otfried Guhne

Otfried Gühne is a theoretical physicist at the University of Siegen who studies multiparticle entanglement and the foundations of quantum mechanics, and whose entanglement methods also reach into optimization problems of classical information theory. Born in Münster in 1975, he studied mathematics and physics there, took his Ph.D. at Hannover in 2004, and joined the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck. In 2007 he won a START prize, and in 2009 he wrote the Physics Reports review "Entanglement detection" with Geza Toth. A European Research Council Consolidator Grant came in 2016, the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award in 2021 for a proof of the Peres conjecture, and a 2022 PRX Quantum paper linked rank-constrained optimization to entanglement theory. At Siegen, where he has been a professor since 2010, he heads the Theoretical Quantum Optics group with Stefan Nimmrichter.

Now at: University of Siegen

Timeline

1975–2004

Münster and a Hannover doctorate

Born in Münster in 1975, he studies mathematics and physics at the University of Münster. From 2001 to 2004 he does his doctoral work in Maciej Lewenstein's group at the University of Hannover, and he earns his Ph.D. there in 2004.
2004–2010

Innsbruck, then a Siegen professorship

In June 2004, he joins Hans Briegel's group at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck as a senior scientist. In 2008, he becomes the leader of a junior research group in Innsbruck, and in 2010 he becomes a professor at the University of Siegen.
2007

A START prize

In 2007, he is one of three Innsbruck researchers to win a START prize, a six-year award of up to 1.2 million euros for young scientists building their own groups. His work covers multiparticle entanglement, including ways to detect it in experiments, and a theoretical contribution to the first "quantum byte" realized by Blatt's experimental group.
2009

A review of entanglement detection

In 2009, he and Geza Toth publish "Entanglement detection" in Physics Reports, a 90-page review of methods for proving that a state is entangled. It covers Bell inequalities and entanglement witnesses, with an emphasis on witnesses, and discusses experiments that implement some of the methods.
March 2016

An ERC Consolidator Grant

In March 2016, he is announced as one of five North Rhine-Westphalian winners of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. He leads the Theoretical Quantum Optics group at Siegen, and his project studies temporal quantum correlations, meaning measurements on a single quantum system at different times.
2021

Proving the Peres conjecture

In 2021, he shares the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations with Zhen-Peng Xu and Jing-Ling Chen for "Proof of the Peres Conjecture for Contextuality", published in Physical Review Letters in 2020. The paper shows that the 18-vector construction of Cabello, Estebaranz and García-Alcaine uses the minimal set of measurements for a proof of the Kochen-Specker theorem.
2022

A rank-constrained optimization hierarchy

In 2022, PRX Quantum publishes "Quantum-Inspired Hierarchy for Rank-Constrained Optimization" by Xiao-Dong Yu, Timo Simnacher, H. Chau Nguyen and Gühne. The paper links rank-constrained optimization to the theory of quantum entanglement and builds a hierarchy of semidefinite programs, which it applies to classical problems such as the maximum cut problem and pseudo-Boolean optimization.
As of October 2026

Head of Theoretical Quantum Optics

As of October 2026, he is a professor at the University of Siegen and heads the Theoretical Quantum Optics group together with Stefan Nimmrichter. The group works on entanglement, quantum thermodynamics, and methods such as shadow tomography and error mitigation to analyze and improve quantum information processing devices; his own research focuses on multiparticle entanglement and the foundations of quantum mechanics.