n 12.07.22 – Professor Pasquale Scarlino, head of the EPFL Hybrid Quantum Circuits Laboratory (HQC) and assistant professor tenure track at the Institute of Physics (IPHYS), has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for his project “Strong-H-cQED: Hybrid Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics in the Strong and Ultra-Strong Coupling Regime”.
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ERC Starting Grants are given each year to researchers of any nationality and in any field with 2-7 years of research experience after the completion of their PhD. These grants are highly competitive and are awarded to researchers with a promising scientific track record who submit an excellent proposal. Each Starting Grant can be up to €1.5 million given over a period of five years.

Through the “Strong-H-cQED” project, Scarlino and his team will conduct experimental studies of hybrid superconductor/semiconductor devices implemented with electrostatically defined quantum dots (QDs) interacting with compact microwave superconducting resonators and waveguides.

Research on mesoscopic quantum systems has led to the rise of quantum technologies based on our ability to create, manipulate, and detect individual quantum states in diverse devices, such as electronic, photonic, and superconducting nanostructures. Understanding and engineering interactions among the different fundamental properties, such as electrical charge and spin, at such small scales is a key prerequisite for future advancements in nanotechnology.

The goal of this project is to provide new insights that can be interpreted and engineered as a resource to encode and manipulate quantum information to perform quantum computation and simulation tasks. By promoting the interaction between charge\spin degrees of freedom in semiconductors with microwave photons in superconducting devices, this project will help build systems that are unique and complex yet versatile, and that allow the exploration of light-matter interaction at the fundamental level and realizing innovative applications in quantum information technology.

“My team and I are excited about this grant because it will allow us also to focus on fundamental aspects of this hybrid platform, which we will hope will have widespread implications for our understanding of light-matter interaction,” Scarlino says.

This project will be financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI) due to the non-association of Switzerland to Horizon Europe.

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