CERN the European Laboratory for Particle Physics provides the infrastructure and in particular accelerators for a large variety of physics experiments for users from Europe and elsewhere. These experiments range from low energy atomic physics to particle physics at the highest available energies. The flagship project at CERN is the Large Hadron Collider and the experiments attached to it. At...
Accelerators are developed and built to help advance the limits of our knowledge across a wide spectrum of fields. The high energy and precision frontiers in particle physics, synchrotron light sources with high intensity, coherence and extremely short pulses, intense neutron and muon beams as well as proton beams for medical applications, are some examples of recent advances that have taken...
The discovery in 2015 by the LIGO collaboration of the first gravitational wave signal from coalescing black holes and the superb performance of the LISA Pathfinder satellite opened a new window to explore the Universe.
I will discuss these exciting developments and also the future of the field, in particular the space-based mission LISA to detect gravitational waves from space. I will give an...
CHEOPS (Characterising ExOPlanet Satellite) is the first exoplanet mission dedicated to the search for transits of exoplanets by means of ultrahigh precision photometry of bright stars already known to host planets. CHEOPS is also the first S-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme and is scheduled to launch end of 2018. The mission is a partnership between Switzerland and...
Arguably, the only really useful single photon source in quantum technology is a source of close-to-perfect single photons. The demands are stringent in terms of purity (the level of anti-bunching), coherence (the level of indistinguishability) and brightness (the efficiency of the entire device). Such a source would find applications in device-independent quantum cryptography. The quantum...
Light can hold, move and measure micro- and nano particle without touching. Thus, optical tweezers have emerged as an exciting technology which enables not only to confine microscopic particles near the focal spot of a tightly focused laser beam, but also to measure forces at the nanoscale or quantify biomechanics of single cells.
Complex tailored light field based on holographic principles...
Manufacturing and optical design technologies have placed considerable limitations on the realization of highly useful reflective optical systems. However, recent advances in manufacturing technology combined with novel optical designs that take advantage of the total technology potential has greatly increased the capability of reflective optical systems. This has led to the creation of new...
Light-matter interaction in condensed matter is a fascinating research field, at the intersection between physics and technology. Semiconductor quantum structures have played a very important role in this field and are a clear example of how fundamental physics and technology mutually enrich each other. The advent of epitaxial growth (bottom-up) has allowed the realization of 2-dimensional...
Recently we have predicted a new quasiparticle - the angulon - which is formed when a quantum impurity (such as a molecule, atom, or electron) exchanges its orbital angular momentum with a many-particle environment (such as lattice phonons or a superfluid) [1,2].
Soon thereafter we obtained strong evidence that angulons do exist, and are, in fact, created in experiments on molecules trapped...
With regard to the development of approaches to realize “Designer Solids” by programmed assembly of building units taken form libraries, recently metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted a huge interest. Here, we will focus on MOF-based electrochemical [1,2], photoelectrochemical [3] and photovoltaic devices [4,5]. Internal interfaces in MOF heterostructures are also of interest with...
The miniaturization trend in the semiconductor industry has led to the understanding that interfacial properties are crucial for device behaviour. Spintronics has not been alien to this trend, and phenomena such as preferential spin tunnelling, the spin-to- charge conversion due to the Rashba–Edelstein effect and the spin–momentum locking at the surface of topological insulators have arisen...
Precision studies of antihydrogen might shed light on one of the most tantalizing mysteries in today’s Physics: the asymmetry of matter-antimatter abundance in the Universe. In this presentation, we review the developments in the experiments ATHENA and ALPHA, housed at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, leading to the first production of low-energy anti-atoms [1] and later the first trapping of...
Laser-cooled trapped ions are among the most promising candidates for quantum computing platforms. Quantum information can be encoded in ions’ electronic states, where it can be processed with high-fidelity gate operations and read out deterministically. An outstanding challenge, not only for ion-trap computers but for all experimental realizations, is how to link together remote quantum...
