The Interdisciplinary Research Institute of Grenoble (IRIG) belongs to the Commissariat for Atomic Energy (CEA), a national organization which aims at bridging the gap between fundamental research and applications. CEA’s Fundamental Research Division (DRF) is active in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and health, materials sciences, climate sciences and the environment. Within this department, the IRIG Institute, created in 2019 by bringing together 3 former Grenoble institutes of the DRF (IBS, BIG and INAC), conducts research in biology, health, nanosciences, cryotechnologies and new technologies for energy and the environment. Physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians, computer scientists and mathematicians participate jointly in this fundamental research and the applications that result from it, giving the institute a remarkable capacity to respond to major societal challenges.
Key people on the project
Xavier WAINTAL, PI of CEA Grenoble, graduated from Polytechnique school, Paris area, in 1995 (X92), did a master of theoretical physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, and moved on to the group of J-L Pichard in Saclay for his PhD (1999). He then spent two years as a postdoc in P. Brouwer’s group in Cornell University, USA and was hired as a permanent researcher in CEA Saclay in 2002. In 2009, Xavier moved to INAC, CEA Grenoble, where he is now leading PHELIQS Lab. Xavier is particularly interested in developing new numerical techniques to tackle difficult quantum problems and make them available to other physicists through open source codes (kwant project).
PHELIQS Lab has been developing many techniques that are not yet in the open. One of them is the generalization of KWANT to address time-dependent systems. We are at a very exciting time where high frequency experiments in the quantum regime are moving from the theory papers to actual real experiments. Many concepts from quantum optics (single photon source, interferometers, tomography, etc) start to get their electronics counterpart.
Members
- Xavier WAINTAL (PI)
- Christoph GROTH (PhD, scientific staff)
- Eleni CHATZIKYRIAKOU (postdoctoral researcher)
- Antonio LACERDA (PhD student)