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FWF/Luiza Puiu

Experimental physicist Uroš Delić was awarded one of the prestigious START prizes in Vienna today, the highest Austrian award for young scientists. He will carry out his project on interacting quantum systems, endowed with around 1.2 million euros, as a junior group leader at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck.

From individual photons to superconductors, quantum physics is able to describe phenomena on a wide range of scales with unrivaled precision. However, physicists usually consider the systems to be isolated from their environment - a useful fiction, but one that does not correspond to reality. Uroš Delić will use the FWF START Prize for his project “QNONREC” to investigate how interacting quantum systems behave and open the door to a new field of research.

While quantum physics of individual, well-isolated systems is well understood, many-particle systems give physicists a headache. Yet the latter are the normal case in the world outside of laboratories. In order to investigate interacting quantum systems, the project aims to bring together several levitated quantum systems whose behavior can be precisely controlled and analyzed using lasers and optical resonators.

Uroš Delić is an experimental physicist. After studying physics and computer science in the Serbian capital Belgrade, Delić moved to the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate with distinction in 2019. This was followed by research stays, e.g. at the MIT. Today, Delić researches and teaches at the University of Vienna and will become a junior group leader at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Innsbruck of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Austrian Science Fund FWF awarded eight FWF START prizes this year in addition to the FWF Wittgenstein Prize. The awardees were successful in the highly competitive selection process from 112 applications. The eight funded projects, four of which are led by women, come from all disciplines and are each funded with up to 1.2 million euros. The FWF-START awards are aimed emerging top researchers who are given the opportunity to plan their research for the longer term with financial security.