D-PHYS News

Marina Marinkovic works to understand more about the strong force that binds quarks and gluons into hadrons as described by quantum chromodynamics.

Researchers studied how quantum many-body scars, states that resist thermalisation, could be probed experimentally in a variety of systems and thus harnessed for quantum information processing applications.

At the beginning of 2024, the Institute for Theoretical Physics will welcome Professors Juan Felipe Carrasquilla Álvarez and Nicolò Defenu.

A new study points to potentially unacknowledged biases that affect grants awarded by the European Research Council.

Researchers from the Institute for Theoretical Physics used a more general formulation of quantum mechanics to study a breakdown of adiabaticity.

Per Moosavi, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich, talks about what makes a good scientific workshop and what it takes to bring together different research communities.

Experimentalists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (Germany), in close collaboration with theoretical physicist Eugene Demler at ETH Zurich, observed for the first time in microscopic detail how magnetic correlations mediate the pairing of quantum entities known as holes. The work establishes an intriguing platform for exploring theoretical models of high-temperature superconductivity — and might guide future efforts for designing novel quantum materials.

Tobias Donner, Senior Scientist and lecturer in the Quantum Optics Group at the Institute for Quantum Electronics, has received a SERI-financed ERC Consolidator Grant. He plans to use the funding to explore the fundamental principles behind the interaction between quantum many-body systems and light.

In 2022, the Swiss team won the World Physics Championship, the International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT). Singapore and Poland came second and third.

A method known as quantum key distribution has long held the promise of communication security unattainable in conventional cryptography. An international team of scientists, including ETH physicists, has now demonstrated experimentally, for the first time, an approach to quantum key distribution that uses high-quality quantum entanglement to provide much broader security guarantees than previous schemes.

Letting your curiosity run free, asking a thousand questions and learning something new. On 17 June 2022, the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich welcomed several thousand guests at the summer festival of science on the Hönggerberg campus, the Night of Physics 2022.

ETH Zurich is a magnet for talented people from all over the world. It also thrives to attract the greatest talents for its Master’s programme. Five outstanding students started their Master's in Physics in September 2021 with a ETH Excellence Scholarship. This support enables them to concentrate fully on their studies – or to study at ETH Zurich at all.

The Swiss National Science Foundation's SNSF professorships are intended for highly qualified young researchers who aspire to a permanent professorship. Over  six years, quantum researcher Oded Zilberberg conducted his research project as an assistant professor at the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich under this SNSF funding scheme.

Eugene Demler, quantum researcher and professor at ETH Zurich, was honoured for his theoretical work on quantum fluids and solids, especially for his contributions to the study of ultracold atoms in optical lattices.

14 April 2021 is World Quantum Day! On the occasion of the launch of this initiative, the Quantum Center, ETH Zurich invites you, your family and friends to an online interview with Professors Yiwen Chu and Renato Renner, moderated by doctoral student Chiara Decaroli.

A slight twist between two layers of graphene generates a wealth of strongly interacting states. New theory work shows that sandwiching this assembly between ferromagnets forces the “valley” degree of freedom to dominate the physics, enriching the prospects of such twisted bilayer systems even further.

ETH professor Renato Renner is one of the world’s leading theoreticians in quantum information science. He talks about the latest developments. Renato Renner’s group focuses on the question of how the processing and transmission of information relates to physical laws.

In combined theoretical and experimental work, ETH physicists introduce and demonstrate a novel mechanism for electron optics in two-dimensional solid-state systems. The discovery opens up a route to engineering quantum-optical phenomena in a variety of materials and devices.

How can we protect communications against 'eavesdropping' if we don’t trust the devices used in the process? This is one of the main questions in quantum-cryptography research. Researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich have now developed the theoretical groundwork for a communication protocol that guarantees one hundred percent privacy.

Combined theoretical and experimental work unveils a novel mechanism through which criticality emerges in quasiperiodic structures — a finding that provides unique insight into the physics on the middle ground between order and disorder.

The National Academy of Sciences (US) has announced the election of 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, among them ETH physicist Jürg Fröhlich.  

A concept known as ‘fragile topology’ has been puzzling physicists ever since it emerged two years ago. Two teams, one led by ETH physicists, have now developed a comprehensive theoretical and experimental framework to pin down the essence of the concept — and establish ways how to potentially harness it in applications.

From the International Women’s Day in March 2019 to March 2020, the Office of Equal Opportunities at ETH Zurich “Equal!” is portraying 12 female assistant professors. They work in different fields of research, come from different countries and have different personalities. With their diversity, they enrich ETH Zurich.

Structures known as ‘time crystals’ — which repeat in time as conventional crystals repeat in space — have recently captured the interest and imagination of researchers across disciplines. The concept has emerged from the context of quantum many-body systems, but ETH physicists have now developed a versatile framework that clarifies connections to classical works dating back nearly two centuries, thus providing a unifying platform to explore seemingly dissimilar phenomena.

The 2019 Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics, one of the most highly endowed physics prizes in Germany, will be awarded to ETH physics professor Matthias Troyer. He is honoured for his contributions to the development of quantum Monte Carlo algorithms.

Quasiparticles that behave like massless fermions, known as Weyl fermions, have been in recent years at the centre of a string of exciting findings in condensed matter physics. The group of Sebastian Huber at ETH Zurich now reports experiments in which they got a handle on one of the defining properties of Weyl fermions — their chirality

The demonstration of quantum interference between topological states of light, by an international team of researchers including ETH physicist Oded Zilberberg, signals a way to exploiting the quantum properties of light in photonic devices with unique robustness against disorder.

An international team including two ETH physicists has demonstrated that algorithms and hardware developed originally in the context of quantum computation can be harnessed for quantum-enhanced sensing of magnetic fields.

As part of its focus topic "Venturing into the unknown — How fundamental research creates options for the future", ETH Globereports on the  contributions of ETH physicists to the field of quantum computation, and to other areas where fundamental research already had a lasting effect.

Twice a year, the management of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich organizes events for all members of the department: the Department Day in June and the New Year's aperitif in January. These are great opportunities for the approximately 500 members of the department to come together and hear the latest news from the department management and from the research groups.

Not only Swiss Cantonal Schools, but also the 14th General Lyceum of Thessaloniki and the Psychiko College High School visited the Department of Physics in recent weeks. 77 high school students were guided by students across the Hönggerberg campus and took part in various, tailored programmes. Or they explored the campus by themselves using maps.

Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them the essential information needed to understand the underlying physics.

In a world in which we use devices that we do not necessarily trust, can there be any privacy? Yes, and that's precisely what device-independent quantum cryptography achieves. New work now shows how this ‘ultimate’ level of communication security could be reached in practise.

Around 1,200 ETH members responded to the Executive Board’s invitation to this year’s Christmas reception. After looking back at some of the year’s highlights and getting a preview of the ETH plus initiative, the newly launched ALEA Award was presented, with physics professor Renato Renner becoming its first receipient.

Five ETH researchers receive one of the coveted Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC), among them physicist Sebastian Huber. Their projects are funded with around two million Swiss francs each.  

Every year, the Association of Students at ETH Zurich (VSETH) awards the "Golden Owl" to particularly committed teachers. Among the recipients this year is also physics professor Renato Renner.

In physics, scientists encounter not only fundamental, but often also philosophical problems. To study questions of the latter category, ETH physicist Jens Jäger completes a Master's degree in Philosophy of Physics at the University of Oxford. Owing to an Annual Scholarship from the Swiss Study Foundation, he can focus fully on the one-year course.

The ETH Board appointed three new professors and awarded the title of Professor to five recipients upon application of ETH President Lino Guzzella. Among them are Christian Degen, new Associate Professor of Spin Physics, and Aude Gehrmann-De Ridder and Vadim Geshkenbein, new Adjunct Professors at the Departement of Physics.

Every year, the Association of Students at ETH Zurich (VSETH) awards the "Golden Owl" to particularly committed teachers. We are delighted that this year also physics professor Manfred Sigrist has been awarded for his commitment to teaching.

It is with great sadness that we report the deaths of Diethelm and Barbara Würtz, who were killed in a car accident on 28 July 2016. Both Diethelm and Barbara worked at the ETH Zurich: Prof. Dr. Diethelm Würtz as a researcher and teacher in the Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Dipl.-Psych. Barbara Schröder-Würtz as an advisor in the Human Resources Division.

In the current issue of the journal Nature Physics, ETH physicists Oded Zilberberg and Sebastian Huber describe unexpected connections between physics and the mathematical field of topology. With their pieces they provide intriguing outlooks on two aspects of ‘topological matter’ — a field of great current interest, and one to which physicists at ETH Zurich have contributed substantially over the years.

On occasion of the 70th birthday of ETH physics professor Jürg Fröhlich, a one-day symposium was held in his honour.

Are there common areas of interest between physics and theater? As part of the lecture series "Getting Real" at the Zurich University of the Arts, ZHdK, the two ETH physicist Gregor Jotzu and Philipp Kammerlander have been invited as guest speakers.

ETH physicist Renato Renner wants to demonstrate the conditions that must be met for quantum cryptography to be secure. The fundamentals that he must first define open up a door to a whole new world.

On application of the President of ETH Zurich, Professor Lino Guzzella, the ETH Board appointed at its meeting of 25/26 May 2016 a total of 18 professors, among them two physics professors.

Charalampos Anastasiou, Professor at the Institute for Theorectical Physics, has been awarded one of the prestigious ERC Advanced Grants.

ETH Professor Matthias Troyer has won the 2016 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society.