[2013-08-20] In October 2013, young Catalan physicist Oriol Romero-Isart will add his expertise to the Innsbruck quantum physics community. Shortly after his recruitment to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, he received one of the most highly valued European research grants: an ERC Starting Grant. The physical theorist will study the control and manipulation of quantum systems through magnetic fields and superconductors.
Oriol Romero-Isart will start his post as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck in October. He has also been appointed Junior Research Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the second Professor, after the recently appointed Gerhard Kirchmair, who has been recruited to Innsbruck through a process similar to tenure-track initiated by quantum physicist Peter Zoller. The professorships are limited to five years and are established to provide young scientists more opportunities at Austrian universities. “Both the position in Innsbruck and the ERC Starting Grant provide optimum conditions for establishing an independent research group. It is a truly exciting and challenging task,” says Romero-Isart, who is looking forward to starting his work in Innsbruck.
New ideas for quantum technologies
Laser light revolutionized the investigation of quantum systems. In the last decades, it has been used in almost all experiments as a tool to control and manipulate quantum systems. However, laser light poses some fundamental limitations, for example, minimum coherence length based on diffraction limit. In addition, the scattering and absorption of light particles (photons) causes heating and particle loss. With his research in Innsbruck, Oriol Romero-Isart wants to overcome these obstacles. He will work on new theoretical suggestions on how to harness the degree of freedom of quantum systems with magnetic fields and superconductors to access an unprecedented parameter regime in the fields of quantum nano- and micro-mechanical oscillators, quantum simulation with ultracold atoms and solid-state quantum information processing.
For example, Romero-Isart will investigate possibilities on how to levitate superconducting microspheres by using magnetic fields and to prepare quantum mechanical superpositions of the microsphere in unprecedented size. Another project is to study the realization of superconducting vortex magnetic nanolattices for ultracold atoms. This could lead to the simulation of quantum many-body systems with low decoherence and three orders of magnitude larger energy scales than in standard optical lattices. In addition, the physical theorist is considering hybrid systems made of superconductors and ferromagnets, which could enhance the coupling of remote magnetic nitrogen-vacancy defect centres in diamond. The goal is to design an all-magnetic quantum information processor.
About Romero-Isart
Oriol Romero-Isart was born in 1981 in Terrassa near Barcelona and majored in physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. After finishing his major in 2004 and PhD in 2008 he received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and started working at Ignacio Cirac's department at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching near Munich. Cirac himself held the position as Professor at the University of Innsbruck in the 1990s. At the beginning of 2013 Oriol Romero-Isart received the highly valued award Premio Investigador Novel en Física Teórica of the BBVA bank group in Madrid.