Quantum Nanoscience (PGI-3)

Our recent research results on the charge transport in quantum materials were highlighted on the cover of Advanced Nanotechnology.

Dr. Jun Huang and Dr. Taner Esat from Forschungszentrum Jülich have each received an ERC Starting Grant worth up to € 1.5 million from the European Research Council (ERC) for their research in the fields of electrochemical energy conversion (Huang) as well as quantum information science and quantum sensor technology (Esat). With the ERC Starting Grants, the European Research Council supports outstanding scientists in an early phase of their career, providing funding for innovative projects in basic research. Applications are evaluated only on the basis of scientific excellence. Forschungszentrum Jülich has already received 26 ERC grants, including Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, and Synergy Grants.

In a scientific breakthrough, an international research team from Germany's Forschungszentrum Jülich and Korea's IBS Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) developed a quantum sensor capable of detecting minute magnetic fields at the atomic length scale. This pioneering work realizes a long-held dream of scientists: an MRI-like tool for quantum materials. Dr. Taner Esat from Jülich’s Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-3) explains what it is all about.

The next-generation photoemission analyser, NanoESCA MARIS, enables both pulse and real-space spectroscopy. The instrument was delivered before Christmas and finally installed at PGI-3 in February 2024 by an expert from Scienta Omicron. From now on, PGI-3 scientists will perform photoemission orbital tomography experiments as part of the ERC Synergy project "Orbital Cinema".

Physicist Dr. Taner Esat from Forschungszentrum Jülich has been honoured with the "Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award 2022". The award, named after the German Nobel Prize winner and surface physicist, recognises young scientists for outstanding achievements in surface science.

Interview on the experiment in our new publication in Science on recording orbital images with an extremely high temporal resolution: Drei Fragen an Stefan Tautz (in german).

Observing incredibly fast quantum processes and chemical reactions at the highest resolution: That is the goal of the "Orbital Cinema" project, for which physicists from the coordinating Forschungszentrum Jülich and the universities in Marburg, Regensburg and Graz today received one of the prestigious Synergy Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). See: https://orbital-tomography.eu

Stefan Tautz is one of the 10 Winners in the category Engineering and Technology at the Falling Walls Berlin Science Week. Watch his talk on YouTube.

We use the “multimeter at the nanoscale”, our proprietary multi-tip scanning probe microscope, for measurements of quantum transport in nanoscale structures and devices. (A. Leis et al. Scientific Reports 2020, 10, 2816)

We address the challenge of performing coherent experiments on single spins in atoms and molecules on surfaces – with the aim of eventually establishing them as qubits. (T. Esat et al., Nature 2018, 558, 573)

Our long-term goal is the design and implementation of a technology for the rapid prototyping of nanoscale functional quantum systems - "3D printing" with single molecules, executed with the tip of a scanning probe microscope. (P. Leinen et al., Science Advances 2020, 6, eabb6987)

We have an outstanding track-record in the development of novel scanning-probe imaging methods, which is complemented by our pioneering work on photoelectron tomography, a reciprocal-space imaging technique of molecular wave functions. (R. Wallauer et al., Science, eabf3286)

Recently, we observed the coherent flip-flop evolution between two atomic spin qubits. (Artwork by Enrique Sahagún, Scixel)

Read more about our new millikelvin scanning tunneling microscope based on adiabatic demagnetisation refrigeration in Rev. Sci. Instrum.

Fabricated single-molecule devices can be very fragile. In Science Advances we reported measurements and calculations of the stability of standing PTCDA. In an interview, Dr. Christian Wagner describes the challenges of this work.

Our recent research results on the charge transport in quantum materials were highlighted on the cover of Advanced Nanotechnology.