Paul Ehrenfest Award 2024

The Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations 2024 has been awarded to Chris Fewster and Rainer Verch for their paper.

Fewster, C.J., Verch, R., Quantum Fields and Local Measurements, Commun. Math. Phys. 378, 851–889 (2020).

The Ehrenfest award is conferred annually, for the most significant publication in the foundations of quantum mechanics published in the five calendar years prior to the prize call.

The citation reads:

We are pleased to announce that this year's award goes to the paper “Quantum Fields and Local Measurements” by Christopher J. Fewster and Rainer Verch, in recognition of its landmark contribution to the foundations of relativistic quantum theory. Drawing on principles from quantum foundations, the Fewster–Verch framework introduces a relativistic measurement theory for algebraic QFT that had been lacking before. While the framework provides a solution to the superluminal signaling problem highlighted by Sorkin, it pushes algebraic QFT to a new operational level, significantly closer to that of standard quantum mechanics.