03/11/22: Our letter on force gradient sensing and entanglement of two nanoparticles interacting via Coulomb forces was published in Physical Review Letters! It shows how continuously homodyning the particle motion and applying a suitable feedback force and drive the system into a non-thermal stationary state that exhibits gaussian entanglement for realistic experimental parameters.

26/08/22: Our work on the first experimental observation of tunable and strong optical binding interactions between levitated nanoparticles in ultra-high vacuum was published in Science! Amongst other things, it demonstrates that the reciprocity of light-induced coupling between levitated nanoparticles can be continuously tuned. For more info, check out this Perspective and this Nature News feature on our work.

25/08/22: Our proposal to create and observe rotational quantum interference of nanodiamonds with embedded NV centres was published in Physical Review Letters today!

24/08/22: Our paper on heating and decoherence of charged nanoparticles close to surfaces was now published in Physical Review X Quantum! The article presents a comprehensive theoretical toolbox of how dielectric surfaces impact the rotational and centre-of-mass motion of arbitrarily shaped and charged bodies.

12/08/22: More personal news: I am excited to share that I have been admitted to the prestigious Heisenberg programme by the DFG!

29/06/22: Some personal news: I completed my Habilitation at the Faculty of Physics, University of Duisburg-Essen, and I am now Privatdozent in Duisburg!

20/02/22: Our Letter on interferometric control of nanorotor alignment appeared in Physical Review A! It shows how a Mach-Zehnder-like interference protocol can be realised in the rotational quantum motion of symmetric rigid bodies.

04/01/22: It’s a great honour and pleasure to be selected as a Young Member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts! For more information check out this news release (only in German).

15/12/21: Our joint experimental/theoretical work on the cylindrical Talbot effect with single photons in ring-core fibres was published in Physical Review A!

02/11/21: The rotation dynamics of nanoscale diamonds can be manipulated by controlling the spin angular momentum of an embedded nitrogen vacancy. To learn how, check out our recent article in Physical Review B!

14/09/21: Chiral molecules can be prepared in quantum superpositions of their enantiomers by far-field matter-wave diffraction. To learn more, check out our recent paper in Physical Review X!

03/09/21: Our manuscript on controlling the rotations of charged nanoparticles in quadrupole ion traps appeared in New Journal of Physics! It derives the macromotion potential for a rotating object in a Paul trap and shows how its rotations and centre-of-mass motion can be resistively cooled with an attached circuit.

01/07/21: Our Perspective on Quantum rotations of nanoparticles appeared in Nature Reviews Physics! Check it out if you want learn more about why the intrinsic non-linearity of rigid body rotations offers a great opportunity for quantum experiments.

24/04/21: Our work on cooling nanorotors via elliptic coherent scattering appeared in Physical Review Letters!

It shows how aspherical nanoparticles can be prepared in their combined rotational-translational quantum ground state by trapping them in an elliptically polarised tweezer and dissipating their energy with an optical cavity. See also this article, selected as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review A.

14/12/20: Our article on levitated quantum electromechanics appeared in npj Quantum Information!

It demonstrates how quantum superpositions of charged nanoparticles in a Paul trap can be prepared and observed by coherently interfacing the endcap electrodes with a charge qubit.

I am excited to announce that I will be giving an online lecture series on Decoherence in macroscopic quantum systems in January 2021! For more information, check this wepage.

Organized by the British Optomechanical Research Network.

16/10/20: James Millen and I wrote a review on exploiting quantum physics with microscale particles, which appeared on the arXiv today!

Addressed to a scientific, non-expert audience.

31/07/20: Our paper on the quantum version of the tennis racket effect appeared in PRL! It demonstrates that tennis-racket oscillations turn persistent for quantum rotors, and that this effect is observable with nanoparticles and molecules.

17/07/20: Our paper on Bragg diffraction of large organic molecules was published in PRL and selected as an Editor’s Suggestion! A popular summary of our work is featured in Physics and in Chemistry World.

22/06/20: Our latest preprint reports the first experimental demonstration of Bragg diffraction of large organic molecules!

09/06/20: Levitating a nanoparticle with an elliptically polarized tweezer inside a high-finesse cavity can cool the rotational and translational motion of the particle into its 6D quantum groundstate.

Today, our preprint Cooling nanorotors by elliptic coherent scattering appeared on the arXiv.

06/05/20: Our manuscript Orbital angular momentum interference of trapped matter waves appeared as a Rapid Communication in Phys. Rev. Research!

A quantum particle confined to a ring geometry can only assume discrete values of the angular momentum. This gives rise to a novel quantum interference effect, allowing geometric phases and interatomic scattering lengths to be determined with high precision.

04/02/20: Our paper Entangling levitated nanoparticles by coherent scattering was published as a Rapid Communication in Phys. Rev. A!

It demonstrates how two nanoscale objects can be entangled by coherent scattering into a common cavity mode. Congratulations Henning!

26/11/19: Had a fun evening at Cafe Scientifique in Harpenden! I talked about macroscopic superposition tests and used the opportunity to play a round of our quantum card game with the audience. Cheers!