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Two outstanding Heidelberg-based early-career researchers – Junior Professor Dr Lauriane Chomaz and Dr Ganna Gryn’ova – have each been awarded an ERC Starting Grant, which is a high amount of funding from the European Research Council (ERC). Prof. Chomaz, an experimental physicist at Heidelberg University, will receive approximately 1.5 million euros for her research work on two-dimensional dipolar quantum gases. The ERC will likewise endow Dr Gryn’ova with around 1.5 million euros for a project on the design and modelling of functional organic materials. The computational chemist from the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) also does research at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) of Ruperto Carola. The funding has been granted for a period of five years.
Lauriane Chomaz’s research project to be funded with the ERC Starting Grant is called “Two-dimensional Dipolar Quantum Gases: Fluctuations and Orders” (2DDip). In it, she addresses the question of how matter orders itself under extreme conditions – in two-dimensional space and in the presence of competing long-range and short-range atomic interactions – and how the resultant order changes under the effect of quantum and thermal fluctuations. With the assistance of an innovative experimental apparatus, the scientist will, for the first time, generate ultra-cold quantum gases from dysprosium atoms in an effective two-dimensional space. Dysprosium is a rare earth and exhibits the highest magnetic moment of all natural stable chemical elements. By examining different states of these magnetic gases, Prof. Chomaz wants to gain new insights into hitherto unexplored, exotic states of matter, their respective orders, ordering mechanisms, and their fluctuations. The physicist hopes that her research will help to answer open questions on two-dimensional ordering in the presence of long-range atomic interactions, and to open up new research avenues.
After graduating in quantum physics, Lauriane Chomaz gained her doctorate in 2014 with a study of Bose gases in reduced dimensions at the École normale supérieure in Paris (France). She then continued her research as a post-doc at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). For that she received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission and was admitted to the Elise Richter Programme of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). In 2021 she joined Heidelberg University as a tenure-track professor. Prof. Chomaz is part of the STRUCTURES Cluster of Excellence with her newly formed “Quantum Fluids” research group at the Institute for Physics. She is also a member of Heidelberg University’s Collaborative Research Centre 1225 “Isolated Quantum systems and Universality under extreme conditions” (ISOQUANT).
See University press release from January 19, 2022:
German | English.