Prof. Luigi Amico, Executive Director of Quantum Physics at the Quantum Research Center (QRC) has received the prestigious Julian Schwinger Foundation (JSF) Grant that includes a cash award amounting to US$250,000 for his cutting-edge project on ‘Rydberg Atomtronics’. Besides the conceptual aspects, experimental sampling will be managed and completed by Prof. Oliver Morsch’s experimental project group in Pisa.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) and QRC will play an integral role in enabling the research project that will run in synergy with two Italian universities - the University of Catania and the University of Pisa.
Besides the resources to fund the project, the grant will facilitate manpower to advance the new scientific concept of quantum circuits, in which Rydberg excitations, instead of matter, can flow in atomic networks created using light-induced traps. Given the very different time scales of matter and excitations transfer and the possibility to engineer flexible schemes for a coherent manipulation of Rydberg excitations, the atomtronic circuits created in this project have the potential to define fast quantum devices, transporting excitations on large spatial scales. This way, the know how explored in the project will be relevant also for quantum computing.
Besides Prof. Amico, dedicated researchers will work on the project from QRC’s Quantum Physics division at Masdar City premises. Together with the collaboration agreements already in place with the universities of Catania and Pisa, this grant will allow our teams to be a crucial part of the knowledge development and any potential IP that is generated.
Prof. Luigi Amico said: “JS Foundation is well known for initiating lines of research that have proven to be revolutionary in science, effectively bridging the gap between visionary scientific results and concrete engineering technologies. We are honoured that our project merited JSF’s consideration and are thrilled to be among the first in the world to work on this topic.”
