Francesca Ferlaino, first winner of the Cécile Dewitt-Morette award / Les Houches School of Physics
Accolade/Award
Research
The first ever Cécile DeWitt-Morette / Les Houches School of Physics 2019 prize is awarded to Francesca Ferlaino, Professor of Physics at the University of Innsbruck and Research Director at the IQOQUI center (Institute for Quantum Optics and
Quantum Information) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Francesca Ferlaino has carried out remarkable work on the gases of ultra-cold atoms. First of all, she obtained new results on low-body number physics and Efimov states.
She then studied the collective quantum properties of the Erbium atom, an atom with a large magnetic moment. The magnetic dipole-dipole interaction is long-range and anisotropic. Associated with the contact interaction which is short-range and isotropic, this interaction considerably enriches the panoply of quantum phases at very low temperature.
His discoveries on the properties of both bosonic and fermionic dipolar gases are particularly spectacular. In particular, the observation of collision resonances, known as Fano-Feshbach resonances with an energy spacing between these resonances very well described by a random matrix theory, a chaos signature in the quantum field, the study of the Bose-Hubbard model with contact and dipole interaction, and the observation of a roton mode precursor of a new state of matter, a superfluid state called supersolid.
His work paves the way for a better understanding of quantum physics at NCorps and for future applications in simulation and quantum engineering.
The Academy paid tribute to him on the occasion of the solemn presentation of his prize under the dome of the Institut de France, on October 15, 2019.
On October 17, following the lecture given by Kip Thorne, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, on the university estate of Saint-Martin-d'hères, Francesca Ferlaino presented her work in a lecture and received the gold medal of Université Grenoble Alpes.
She then studied the collective quantum properties of the Erbium atom, an atom with a large magnetic moment. The magnetic dipole-dipole interaction is long-range and anisotropic. Associated with the contact interaction which is short-range and isotropic, this interaction considerably enriches the panoply of quantum phases at very low temperature.
His discoveries on the properties of both bosonic and fermionic dipolar gases are particularly spectacular. In particular, the observation of collision resonances, known as Fano-Feshbach resonances with an energy spacing between these resonances very well described by a random matrix theory, a chaos signature in the quantum field, the study of the Bose-Hubbard model with contact and dipole interaction, and the observation of a roton mode precursor of a new state of matter, a superfluid state called supersolid.
His work paves the way for a better understanding of quantum physics at NCorps and for future applications in simulation and quantum engineering.
The Academy paid tribute to him on the occasion of the solemn presentation of his prize under the dome of the Institut de France, on October 15, 2019.
On October 17, following the lecture given by Kip Thorne, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, on the university estate of Saint-Martin-d'hères, Francesca Ferlaino presented her work in a lecture and received the gold medal of Université Grenoble Alpes.
Published on February 8, 2021
Updated on February 8, 2021
Updated on February 8, 2021
Cécile Dewitt-Morette Award
Cécile founded Les Houches School of Physics in 1951, and to pay tribute to her, the partners of this internationally renowned school (Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, Grenoble INP and the École normale supérieure de Lyon) joined forces with the Academy of Sciences to create a Grand Prix de l'Académie des sciences "Cécile DeWitt-Morette / Les Houches School of Physics".
