Physical Sciences

Aerosols are key elements of the atmosphere and the Earth system, influencing air quality, climate and human health in the Anthropocene. They scatter or absorb sunlight, serve as nuclei for clouds and precipitation, and adversely affect human health. In particular, human respiratory aerosols are involved in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2…

The basic motivation for the project was the curiosity of how the environment looked like near the South Pole during the last time the planet underwent extreme greenhouse climate conditions ~90 million years ago. Can we define extreme potencies of atmospheric carbon dioxide contents but also underline how significant the…

To use a system that can be very well controlled in the lab (cold atoms) to emulate the dynamics of another system (molecules) which are difficult to predict. Despite of being at the basis of our lives, most problems dealing with molecules are hard to solve even with supercomputers. In…

Light-Emitting Silicon: Demonstration of Efficient Light Emission from a new alloy of hexagonal silicon and germanium to obtain photonic chips, which can revolutionize computing. Silicon is a powerful material pervading our everyday lives. Silicon-based microchips are the basis of nearly every electronic device used in our houses, cars, smart gadgets,…

Quantum theory is one of the two revolutions in modern day physics. However, its underlying root is still very much a mystery. Here we revisit the Stern-Gerlach Experiment, a paradigm of quantum theory, and by using modern technology have managed to shed new light on this fundamental spin quantization experiment.…

Random numbers are widely used for information security, cryptography, stochastic modeling, and quantum simulation. We invent a scalable, robust, energy efficient method for physical true random number generation using a semiconductor laser chip of volume less than 1 mm cubed. Ultrafast emission fluctuations are digitized to produce hundreds of random…

Carbfix is an academic-industrial partnership that has developed a novel approach to capture and store CO2 by its dissolution in water and its injection into subsurface basalts. Once in the subsurface, the injected CO2 reacts with the host rock forming stable carbonate minerals, thus providing for the safe, long-term storage…

To measure the magnetic moment of the muon to unprecedented precision in the search for new fundamental particles and forces that may contribute to the muon’s internal magnetism. By producing copious numbers of subatomic muon particles in a powerful accelerator, a precise measurement of the muon spin precession and the…

A key challenge on the road towards a functional quantum computer is to integrate the individually demonstrated components into a functional and scalable device. I have pioneered the realization of fully chip-integrated quantum gates with trapped ions and have recently demonstrated a high-fidelity self-contained computation register that is both resource-efficient…

By developing high-performance non-classical light sources and multi-photon interference, Jian-Wei Pan and his colleague Chao-Yang Lu together with their team have implemented boson sampling with up to 76 photons out of a 100-mode interferometer, which yields a Hilbert state space dimension of 10^30 and a rate that is 10^14 faster…

The nominating institution Max-Planck-Gesellschaft on the breakthrough: The quest for unusual materials, such as metallic hydrogen or room-temperature superconductors, has been going on for decades. Mikhail Eremets has pioneered high pressure experiments to induce such states, which brought about innovations in materials science, but also high-pressure technology. The group has…

Ten years ago, Professor Arno Rauschenbeutel was the first to couple laser-trapped atoms with light in glass fibers that are 100 times thinner than a human hair. This achievement was a door opener for the field on quantum nanophotonics. There, one studies the interaction of atoms, molecules, or artificial atoms…

The dislocation of water masses, e.g. dropping of the groundwater level, ice melting or sea level change, can only be continuously and homogeneously observed using specially tailored satellite missions. GRACE and GRACE-FO, based on ultra-precise distance measurements between twin satellites, has revolutionized the observation of climate-related changes in the Earth…

While nature builds all her organic materials from CO₂, the stability and inertness of the CO₂ molecule prevents its use in chemical technology. The team of Leitner searches for catalysts as molecular tools to break through this wall. Together with the company Covestro, they developed a catalytic process to incorporate…

Experts in quantum logic spectroscopy and highly charged ions have teamed up for the first high resolution coherent laser spectroscopy of a highly charged ion. This breakthrough, which has pushed resolution by eight orders of magnitude, enables proposed sensitive tests of fundamental constants and interactions, novel dark matter searches, as…

Two states of matter “solid” and “fluid”, which are mutually exclusive in the classical world, can exist simultaneously in the quantum world. The supersolid was created by dysprosium atoms that behave like tiny magnets and that were cooled down to near absolute zero (-273° Celsius). To generate a supersolid, the…

Deep ocean extreme environments – sites of immense beauty, wonder and intrigue – harbor unique and unimagined microorganisms that thrive at radically different pressure, temperature, salinity, and pH regimes compared to those on land or in the surface ocean. State-of-the-art genomic and computational approaches will guide targeted discovery of unique…

The nominating institution Forschungszentrum Jülich on the breakthrough: With quantum computing we face the beginning of a paradigm shift in computer science and scientific computing, which can considerably change science, industry, economy and our every-day life. The demonstration of quantum supremacy, which required a sufficiently large quantum processor with a…