Davide Cadeddu Leaves the Group
Dr. Davide Cadeddu, who earned his Ph.D. in March of this year and has since been working as a post-doc in the group, has accepted a new job starting in 2019. Starting in January, Davide will be working as a Research Associate at Rolic Technologies Ltd., here in the Basel area. Rolic develops and sells applicable coating materials and functional foil products for displays, for security elements and the sealing of highly sensitive products. Rolic’s core competence is light management: with the patent-protected ‘Light Controlled Molecular Orientation’ technology, they modify surfaces on the nanometer-scale to achieve unique optical effects.
Davide has been a key member of our team since May of 2013 and has contributed to many scientific projects including on nanowire mechanics, opto-mechanics, nano-photonics, advanced scanning probe microscopy, and electric field sensing. His excellent experimental intuition and positive presence in the group will be missed. We wish him the best in his new adventure and hope to see him often around town!
Coupling a trapped Ion to a Nanowire
On the 17th, New Journal of Physics published our theoretical study of the coupling between a trapped ultracold ion and a charged nanowire. The manuscript entitled, Classical and quantum dynamics of a trapped ion coupled to a charged nanowire, considers the perturbation of the trapping potential for the ion by the nanowire and discusses the parameters determining the dynamics of the ion under the action of the nanooscillator. We explore the classical dynamics as well as motional quantum states of the ion which can be generated and manipulated with the resonant drive of the nanowire and the effects of anharmonicities of the ion-trap potential on the system. Our modelling indicates that unusual quantum states of the ion motion can be generated with this approach and that sympathetic cooling and quantum entanglement can be realized when both subsystems operate in the quantum regime. This ion-mechanical hybrid system might prove interesting as a new quantum device, for quantum sensing experiments, for spectroscopy and for mass spectrometry.
The work was led and carried out by Ph.D. student Panagiotis Fountas, who is a shared SNI Ph.D. student based in the lab of Prof. Stefan Willitsch in the Chemistry Department. The paper represents the first results of an ongoing collaboration between our group and the Willitsch group and is a prelude to future experimental work in this direction.
Group Dinner
On Friday the 14th the group held its annual end-of-the-year dinner. The dinner was organized by post-docs Davide Cadeddu and Boris Groß at the Restaurant Bodega zum Strauss in down-town Basel. We were joined by current and former group members and friends. Thanks to all for an enjoyable evening!
Prof. Poggio in Aachen
On Monday the 10th Prof. Poggio gave the Physics Colloquium at the Department of Physics at the RWTH Aachen University on the invitation of Prof. Christoph Stampfer.