ERC Advanced Grants for Laserlab Researchers

Andrei Kirilyuk (FELIX): Interaction of light with matter via control of terahertz phonons

With the ERC Advanced Grant project INTERPHON, Andrei Kirilyuk and his group challenge the existing ideas and understanding of the interactions between light and matter, creating a whole new research area at the junction of nonlinear optics, phononics and ultrafast magnetism. Light will be made to communicate with matter in an interactive way, so that matter reciprocates by changing the very resonance
used for excitation. To realise this, INTERPHON will develop novel research methods using short and intense pulses of infrared-to-THz-range free electron laser FELIX. The aim is energy-efficient and ultrafast manipulation of materials.

Thomas Stoehlker (GSI): Highly ionised trapped 229-thorium: A new paradigm towards a nuclear clock

Currently, there are intense research activities in many laboratories worldwide related to the “thorium clock” since such a “nuclear clock” opens new doors to fundamental physics such as e.g. testing time-variations of natural constants and exploring the enigma of dark matter. This may, in the long run, even enable the establishment of a new time standard. Thomas Stoehlker’s project “HITHOR” is a novel access to the “thorium clock” with the focus on highly-ionized 229-thorium, an elementary quantum-system, which consists only of the thorium nucleus and one or few electrons.

Thomas Udem (MPQ): High resolution laser spectroscopy of atomic hydrogen and deuterium

The standard model of particle physics explains how the world is organised at the smallest scale. However, it does not fit all physical observations. One approach to testing the model is to measure physical processes ever more precisely and to determine the constants of nature ever more accurately. With his ERC Advanced Grant, Thomas Udem wants to measure the energies for selected excitations of a hydrogen atom with unprecedented precision. To this end, he and his team will develop an optical trap for hydrogen atoms. In this trap, they can fix atomic hydrogen in such a way that its excitation can be determined with particular precision.

Javier García de Abajo (ICFO): Quantum-enhanced free-electron spectromicroscopy

In his project QUEFES, Javier García de Abajo will introduce a conceptually disruptive approach to capitalise on the quantum nature of free electrons and their interactions with matter and radiation fields aiming to obtain previously inaccessible information on the atomic-scale dynamics of such materials, to reveal hidden properties of the quantum vacuum, and to control the many-body state of quantum matter.

Roberta Croce (LLAMS): Photosynthesis in far-red: from cyanobacteria to plants

When plants grow close together, the lower leaves receive almost exclusively far-red light, which has been thought to be unusable for oxygenic photosynthesis. Recent discoveries, however, show that certain cyanobacteria, the ancestors of plant chloroplasts where photosynthesis takes place, can grow under far-red light. This is where Roberta Croce comes in: She receives an Advanced Grant for her research project “Fared
Well”, through which she aims to learn from those bacteria how to improve plant photosynthesis.

Johannes de Boer (LLAMS): Immunooptical coherence tomography

In the early stages, tumours are too small to be visible with PET and CT. Optical techniques have a much higher resolution and can detect tumours at a much earlier stage. With his ERC Advanced Grant, Johannes de Boer will develop a new optical endoscopic imaging technique to detect cancer in the human body with a resolution 10 to 100 times higher than currently possible. The major challenge is to develop very small motorised catheters that can penetrate deep into the body to determine both the structure and the molecular composition of tissue with light.

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort (ISMO): Time-based single molecule nanolocalisation for live cell imaging

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for her project TimeNanoLive. While current approaches based on the localisation of individual fluorescent molecules allow for observations on the nanometre scale, the current localisation process of these molecules is slow and often limited to the observation of non-living cells. TimeNanoLive aims to revolutionise localisation by using a specific structured illumination to encode the 3D position of fluorescent molecules with increased spatial and temporal resolution.