Nanophotonics, which excels at controlling light in sub-wavelength volumes and providing enhanced light-matter interactions, is opening up unprecedented opportunities in many fields including biology. Our laboratory has world-leading expertise in experimental nanophotonics and its application to biosensing, spectroscopy and bioimaging by combining novelties of nano-scale optics with...
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory construction has started and the first large size telescope is taking data since years at La Palma, Canary Islands, while three more are being built. CTAO will have a leading role in multi-messenger astrophysics, offering a view on the most powerful accelerators of the Universe. A full picture requires the combination of information from different...
Even though most of us tie our shoelaces 'wrongly,' knots in ropes and filaments have been used as functional, structural mechanisms for millennia in sailing, climbing, and surgery. Still, knowledge on physical knots is mostly empirical, and there is a need for physics-based predictive models. For tight knots, highly nonlinear and coupled behavior arises from the intricate 3D geometry, large...
It is a key goal of fusion research to build devices that allow us to create a plasma at sufficiently high pressure and energy confinement time, so that the conditions for a burning plasma can be met. For a long time, progress along these lines was largely based on a "trial-and-error" approach. With the preparation of ITER operation and attempts to design first versions of future fusion power...
Engineering strong interactions between quantum systems is essential for many phenomena of quantum physics and technology. Typically, strong coupling relies on short-range forces or on placing the systems in high-quality electromagnetic resonators, which restricts its range to microscopic distances. We used a free-space laser beam to strongly couple an atomic ensemble and a micromechanical...
Spin-dimer systems are an ideal testbed to study criticality because a quantum phase transition from a disordered to a magnetically ordered phase can be induced by a magnetic field. To determine the spin Hamiltonians of the spin-dimer compounds BaCuSi2O6 and Ba0.9Sr0.1CuSi2O6 inelastic neutron scattering experiments are performed at zero field and the magnetic order in BaCuSi2O6 is...
Physics education has in the past often been centred either on technological applications or the very large or small scales of the universe. As a middle ground, everyday phenomena, biological or soft matter systems are however also very useful to particularly stimulate students without an innate interest in Physics. In this presentation I will show how simple experiments on everyday phenomena...
Considering its geographical size, Switzerland hosts a relatively big number of large-size scientific research infrastructures. With respect to size and esteem, the number one on the list is, of course, CERN, the internationally funded institution situated in Geneva with France as the other host country. Its impact on the prestige of the scientific landscape of Switzerland is enormous. This...
Natural language processing models in organic chemistry have emerged as one of the most effective, scalable approaches for capturing human knowledge and modelling chemical processes. Its use in machine learning tasks demonstrated high quality and ease of use in problems such as predicting chemical reactions [1-2], retrosynthetic routes [3], digitizing chemical literature [4], predicting...
In recent years the simulation of molecular systems with digital quantum computers has amassed a great deal of attention as the community realized quantum chemistry represents one of the most promising and impactful applications of quantum computing. This work has focused on the design of quantum algorithms for the resolution of electronic and vibrational structure problems as well as the...
The fundamental nature of dark or invisible matter remains one of the great mysteries of our time. A leading hypothesis is that dark matter is made of new elementary particles, with proposed masses and interaction cross sections spanning an enormous range. Amongst the technologies developed to search for dark matter particles, two-phase (liquid and gas) xenon time projection chambers are...
Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels requires drastic cuts to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use. The Enhanced Transparency Framework of the Paris Agreement requires all countries to provide transparent information on the implementation and achievement of their national objectives. The atmospheric science community...
In this talk, I will describe recent experiments in atomically-thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) where Coulomb interactions between electrons dominate over their kinetic energy. Our measurements provide a direct evidence that the electrons at densities < 3 · 1011 cm-2 in a MoSe2 monolayer form a Wigner crystal even at B = 0 [1]. This is revealed by...
