Villum Young Investigator Grant for Michele Burrello
NBIA Assistant Professor Michele Burrello has been awarded a Villum Young Investigator Grant for the project "Architectures for non-Abelian anyons". The project will investigate very peculiar properties of solids and gases appearing in particular systems at very low temperatures and very small length scales, where the quantum nature of matter dominates over its classical behavior.
The main focus of the research led by Michele Burrello will be the study of topological materials. These are a new generation of quantum systems characterized by a surprising stability. In such systems, novel particles are predicted to emerge: they are called anyons and exhibit peculiar properties that permit to store and manipulate quantum information in a way protected against most sources of noise and disorder, thus offering a great potentiality for quantum computation.
This project aims at engineering and realizing new quantum architectures for the creation and manipulation of these exotic particles.
Burrello's team will study several condensed matter platforms, ranging from trapped ultracold atomic gases to topological superconductors, with the objective of building new models and fabricating new devices for the observation of anyons. In particular, the grant will fund a PhD student, four postdocs and it will cover the material costs for experiments in hybrid superconducting / semiconducting nanodevices.