The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics is once again recognized for outstanding research achievement: Prof. Dr Fei Ding (Director of Institute for Solid State Physics) has been awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC grants are among the most prestigious funds for scientific and technological research in Europe, and are regarded as a knighthood of the European scientific community due to their tough selection process. Important selection criteria are how visionary the research questions are and what excellent achievements the applicants have made so far.
Prof. Fei Ding already won his first ERC Starting Grant (1.77 million Euros) in 2016, shortly after joining our faculty as a W3 full professor in Nanophysics. Now, with a total value worth 2.7 million Euros, his ERC Consolidator Grant (MiNet) will build a large-scale multipartite entanglement testbed connecting two science cities in northern Germany, Hannover and Braunschweig. Taking advantage of the latest metrology advances, MiNet will use a telecom fiber-based optical clock network to disseminate ultra-stable time/frequency information to devices in remote laboratories in the two cities. If successful, this project will allow us to gain the full advantages of available resources within a clocked quantum network. In the long term, the fiber-based optical clock network, as part of a Pan-European collaborative effort, may help to synchronize a large number of quantum computing and communication devices at large scales that can never be reached before.