Rachel Grange awarded ERC Proof of Concept Grant
- Research awards
- Institute for Quantum Electronics (IQE)
Rachel Grange, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics, receives one of 54 Proof of Concept Grants that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded in the latest funding round. The grant enables her and her group to further explore the commercial potential of a new approach to the characterization of materials.
ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grants provide top-up funding to researchers who hold already an ERC grant. The ERC-PoC grants are worth 150,000 EUR each and can be used in areas such as exploring business opportunities, preparing patent applications or verifying the practical viability of scientific concepts.
Rachel Grange is one of five researchers from Switzerland, and the only one from ETH Zurich, who has been awarded an ERC-PoC Grant in the most recent round (which is the first of three rounds in 2019). She currently holds an ERC Starting Grant, awarded in 2016, for a research programme in which she and her group explore strategies to enhance nonlinear optical signals in oxide nanomaterials.
Basic research with practical potential
Beyond the fundamental interest, the techniques developed by Grange and her team are of substantial practical interest. In particular, they could open up new possibilities for quality control in the medical, electronic and photonic industry. In these industries, the continuous analysis of materials is essential. Typical tools that are currently used in research and industry for quality-control purposes are fluorescence imaging, electron microscopy and photoluminescence. These well-established techniques suffer, however, from several drawbacks, including complex sample preparation, the need for environments — low temperatures or vacuum, for example — that involve expensive hardware, the destructive nature of the measurements, and the amount of time these tests take.
Grange and Mariia Timofeeva, an Ambizione research fellow in her group, have been exploring the idea of using nonlinear optical responses for fast and non-destructive testing of materials since some while now. They use the fact that the nonlinear optical responses of some materials depend strongly on properties such as crystal structure, defects and roughness. Moreover, these techniques are fast and flexible, and do not require involved sample preparation. Support for developing a device based on these ideas — a high-resolution nonscanning multiphoton polarimetric microscope, 'PolarNon' — is coming already through a BRIDGE Proof of Concept Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), awarded to Timofeeva in 2017.
Towards commercialization
With the ERC-PoC grant now awarded to Grange, the PolarNon team can further develop the necessary hardware and software, to work towards an industrial prototype, which will serve as the basis for commercialization. Possible future uses include non-destructive testing and quality control of materials or optoelectronic components in the semiconductor industry, and of metallic or ceramic alloys in the aerospace industry.
(With material form an external page ERC media release)