Logo of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt

Establishment of DQ-mat Collaborative Research Center

03.04.2017

On 1 July 2016, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) established the new Collaborative Research Center 1227, “Designed Quantum States of Matter (DQ-mat) – generation, manipulation and detection for metrological applications and tests of fundamental physics”, at Leibniz Universität Hannover.

The participating scientists will be working on exploiting the special properties of quantum-mechanical systems in order to improve quantum sensors such as optical clocks and accelerometers. In addition to Leibniz Universität Hannover (Institut für Quantenoptik, Institut für Theoretische Physik and Institut für Didaktik der Mathematik und Physik), other participating institutions include the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) of the University of Bremen and PTB in Braunschweig. The research center is designed to last twelve years; for the first four years, the volume of funding will be around 10 million euros.

Experts from the three participating institutions who work in the research areas of many-body physics, quantum information, gravitation, quantum gases and metrology are working together on the development of new methods for the generation, manipulation and detection of quantum states. Investigating these states makes it possible to form a more profound understanding of the quantum properties of multi-body systems. In this way, the new research center has dedicated itself to one of the greatest challenges of modern physics.