ERC Synergy Grant for Klaus Ensslin
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Two research projects with ETH Zurich involvement have been awarded one of the highly coveted ERC Synergy Grants, including a project of ETH physicist Klaus Ensslin and colleagues in France, Canada and Israel, who will work towards measuring entropy and other thermodynamic properties of correlated quantum states in mesoscopic systems.
As basic research continues to advance, the questions involved are becoming increasingly complex. In order to deal with this, the boundaries between the disciplines must be crossed, and expertise and resources from various fields combined. The European Research Council (ERC) launched the Synergy Grant in 2012 to promote projects that make particularly effective and innovative use of synergies to investigate pressing research questions. Two to four research groups must be involved in the projects. The ERC announced today that it would be awarding a Synergy Grant worth a total of EUR 26.6 million to two projects with ETH Zurich involvement, EUR 11.8 million of which will go to ETH Zurich. Both projects focus on the area of quantum research. While ETH professors Lukas Novotny and Romain Quidant are attempting with their Q-Xtreme project to move a particularly large object into a state of quantum superposition, the Quantropy project, with the involvement of D-PHYS professor Klaus Ensslin, is developing innovative measurement procedures in order to better understand complex correlated quantum states in solid state systems. Synergy Grants have been awarded to 34 research projects this year, with funding amounting to a total of about EUR 350 million.
The Quantopy project at a glance
In a common metal, electrons move largely independently of each other. But when they interact in a more complex material, fascinating and often technologically interesting effects appear. Well-known examples are ferromagnetism or superconductivity. In addition, there is a growing number of predictions for novel states in which interacting electrons exhibit properties that contradict intuition on the one hand and are technologically promising on the other. These effects include, for example, Majorana fermions, which in a sense consist of half an electron and, when detected, reveal where they were before. Conventional measurement methods often do not provide clear results for such "exotic" effects.
Klaus Ensslin from the ETH Laboratory for Solid State Physics, together with Frédéric Pierre from the Université Paris-Saclay, Joshua Folk from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Yigal Meir from Ben-Gurion University in Israel, therefore wants to develop fundamentally different measurement methods in the ERC-Synergy project Quantropy. To this end, the team will build on thermodynamic measurement quantities, in particular entropy. With this they will explore how to better understand complex correlated quantum states in solids. For Majorana fermions, for example, the new approach should clearly show whether they occur in a given material. The scientists also hope to gain new insight into other effects such as the recently discovered superconductivity in twisted graphene layers.