Experimental physicist Hanns-Christoph Nägerl from the Department of Experimental Physics has been awarded his second Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC), worth around 2.5 million euros, for his research into ultracold quantum matter. This is the most highly endowed and prestigious European science prize.
Hanns-Christoph Nägerl is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of ultracold quantum many-body systems. He is particularly known for his work on atomic quantum wires and molecular quantum gases. In Ultracold caesium atoms, trapped in a lattice of laser beams and strung like a string of pearls, will serve the quantum physicist as the basis for his experiments, in which he will investigate various fundamental quantum physical phenomena. Nägerl plans to study quantum transport and many-body localization as part of the ERC project. He is also planning to investigate so-called anyons, quasiparticles that interpolate between bosons and fermions, the fundamental building blocks of matter, in detail. His team recently published the results of an initial experiment on one-dimensional anyons in Nature. Many of these phenomena cannot be observed directly in nature and are also very difficult to study on classical computers. "Experimental quantum simulation gives us direct access to these theoretically proposed phenomena. By allowing the quantum particles to interact in a very controlled way, we can directly observe the dynamics of the quantum world," explains Hanns-Christoph Nägerl.
