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 the project now funded by the European Research Council (ERC), Nägerl aims to further advance the understanding of interacting many-body quantum systems. 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.
About the award
With Advanced Grants, the ERC supports established scientists from all disciplines whose highly innovative research goes significantly beyond the current state of research and opens up new areas of research. The award is associated with funding of a maximum of 2.5 million euros over a period of five years. For Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, this is already the second Advanced Grant in his career - he received his first in 2018.
On the person
Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, born in 1967, studied physics and mathematics in Göttingen and San Diego. He completed his doctorate in physics under Prof. Rainer Blatt in Göttingen and Innsbruck. After a postdoctoral stay at the California Institute of Technology (1998-2000), he helped to set up Prof. Rudolf Grimm's research group in Innsbruck, where he also completed his habilitation. In 2006 he was appointed associate professor. In 2011, he was promoted to full professor. He has been awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for his achievements and has already received two ERC grants (Consolidator 2011, Advanced 2018), a START Prize and the Rudolf Kaiser Prize.
