Monthly Archives: October 2018

Interactions: Beatriz Roldán Cuenya

Posted on by
Reply

Beatriz Roldán Cuenya is the Director of the Interface Science Department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

My undergraduate training was in Physics with a minor in Materials Science in Spain. Subsequently I did my PhD in Solid State Physics in Germany and from there I transitioned to a postdoctoral position at a Chemical Engineering Department in the United States. Currently, I am working at the interface between physics and chemistry investigating thermal and electro-catalytic processes taking place over nanostructured materials. My group’s research program takes advantage of in situ and operando microscopy and spectroscopic characterization methods (including synchrotron-based techniques) for the understanding of correlations between material properties such as chemical reactivity and specific structural, electronic and chemical characteristics of the system.

What did you find most difficult when you started working in an area out of your comfort zone?

Missing basic chemical concepts and nomenclature that a physicist does not acquire during his/her undergraduate training, but are essential for the understanding of chemical processes taking place at gas/liquid/solid interfaces. This motivated a slow literature review since I had to stop often to go back to basic undergraduate books before being able to dig deeper into the current literature. However, the strong mathematics background that is inherent part of a physicist’s training was very helpful when dealing with some of the topics in the department of Chemical Engineering I transferred to.

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

Reading the related literature, specifically review articles, while having side by side undergraduate chemistry books.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

It was exciting because there were a lot of new things to learn, but also somewhat frustrating since there were at times gaps of knowledge that prevented me from understanding a significant fraction of the content presented.

What are the main challenges and the main advantages of working in an interdisciplinary team?

The main challenge I found was to convince the scientific communities you are interacting with, in my case, physicists, chemists and chemical engineers, that you can contribute meaningful new research ideas and findings to their respective fields even without a formal undergraduate training in such field. It was also difficult to recruit students from the different disciplines, the physicists in my department were scared to join the group because I did “too much chemistry” and the chemists were concerned that they could not follow the math or that they did not have sufficient background in specific topics such as quantum mechanics or electrodynamics.

The advantage was that once you managed to build an interdisciplinary team, the boundaries soften and the student and postdocs end up working in a much richer environment where accelerated knowledge transfer is favoured. We managed to become a self-sufficient group by teaming up chemists that were in charge of sample synthesis and for example electrochemical characterization, chemical engineers contributing to our reactor design and thermal catalysis work, and physicists providing microscopy and spectroscopic tools for the characterization of our catalytic materials.

What would be your advice to a PI leading an interdisciplinary group?

To try to get joint appointments in the different departments of interest to foster student recruitment and the exchange of ideas with other faculty colleagues. If possible, this should include teaching some advanced courses or given some introductory presentation as guest lecturer in the partner department.

Do you find it particularly difficult to obtain funding? Or to get your research published?

Actually yes, this was the case at first. When I was an assistant professor in Physics in the United States it was difficult to convince the external reviewers in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering departments that even though my background was different, I still had the required expertise to bring to success a given interdisciplinary project. I found that chemists are more comfortable reviewing/funding chemists and same for physicists, especially when you attend mixed review panels at science foundations. However, as an assistant professor in Physics my first grant came from the American Chemical Society (Petroleum Research Fund) and the second, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, was granted by the Materials Research Division in the sub-area of Solid State Chemistry.

I faced the same difficulties when trying to publish in chemistry-oriented journals while submitting papers with a Physics Department affiliation. Nevertheless, with time and as visibility improved I managed to establish good connections in both communities and get invitations to present my work in both communities, which will in return facilitated publication in the top journals of both fields.

Is there any anecdote you would like to share?

I recall the frustration of being a female assistant professor in physics struggling to convince editors in chemistry-related fields to send out your work for external peer-review. I learned the hard way that when a more senior collaborator in the “correct” scientific disciple was added to the co-author list the paper would be easily sent out for review and subsequently published, while when similar quality work was submitted directly by myself it was almost never considered by the top journals. That is a serious issue since it might end up encouraging junior people with innovative ideas not to stand up on their own but seek for “strong senior supporters” to champion a given paper to get into the system (a given journal database) with the end result being that the real contribution of the junior person might be questioned.

Interactions: Gaia Donati

Posted on by
Reply

Gaia Donati is an Associate Editor at Nature, where she handles papers in areas including quantum physics, particle physics, nuclear physics and mathematical physics.

What made you want to be a physicist?

I was good at both physics and chemistry in high school, and in fact I remember being drawn between the two… My fascination for physics was stronger though: physics could explain natural phenomena all around us by means of models and theories conceived to make sense of empirical observations while also offering a predictive tool (before being replaced by its better-working extension or alternative, of course). I could relate to the relentless search for unifying principles, and I very much liked the interplay between theory and experiment (which isn’t the case in mathematics, for example).

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

Oh, you know, I would have gone into scientific publishing – wait, that’s what I’ve done! And now for a serious answer… Had I not taken up physics, I might have followed one of my two long-standing interests – music and photography. At some point I considered becoming a professional photographer (and join the legendary Magnum Photos agency); given that I am mildly obsessed with British, Irish and North American folk music, I did contemplate the idea of becoming an ethnomusicologist and traditional folk singer in order to study and preserve this rich musical heritage.

What is the development that you would really like to see in the next 10 years?

It would be fantastic to see physicists and biologists talking to one another ‘for real’ – collaborating on some of the challenges of our times, in other words. I am well-aware of the differences (in terms of mindset, approach to problems and communication practice to cite a few) between the two disciplines, but I am convinced that physics needs biology as much as biology needs physics. I feel that some progress has been made over the years, but there’s still a long way to go.

What’s your favourite (quasi-)particle?

My background is in experimental quantum optics, so my answer will be absolutely predictable – once on team photon, always on team photon.

What Sci-Fi gadget / technology would you most like to have / see come true (and why)?

A time machine, please. Several years ago I even bought the book “How to Build a Time Machine” by Paul Davies, which comes with some sort of blueprint for this technology. It’s a pity that I never took the time to follow the steps and see if I could build this…

What would your dream conference be like?

I recently read that scientists increasingly complain about how some conferences are becoming less and less useful – too crowded, more about showcasing one’s latest results to impress the audience than to share findings and engage in constructive discussions, too packed with sessions and events. I don’t know if this is true, but I’d say that the conferences I enjoy attending tick at least some of these boxes: a ‘human’ number of participants (not exceeding 200?), a topic not too narrow but not too broad either (which is tricky, I get that), speakers at different stages of their careers, and few parallel sessions (if any). Some meetings feature one or two days of tutorials or taught classes on top of their regular programmes; I think this is a good idea as well, especially for graduate students or for early-career researchers who might have just switched topics.

Interactions: Cosima Schuster

Posted on by
Reply

Cosima Schuster is program director in the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the fields of statistical physics, soft matter, biological physics and nonlinear dynamics.

What did you train in? What are you working on now?

I trained in solid state physics as a theorist. Now I work in research administration as a program director in the field of condensed matter physics as well as  statistical and biological physics.

Do you think of yourself as a physicist or a funder?

I work for a self-governing organisation for science and research which funds excellent science without regard to extra-scientific factors, in a strict bottom-up competitive approach to ensure science-driven decisions. Hence, I consider myself not a funder, but an administrator who needs a good knowledge of physics.

What motivated you to move away from active research?

I feel more comfortable working on several topics with a broad range of interests than to work hard on specific questions.

What did you find most difficult when you first had contact with other disciplines?

You have to learn a new language with a lot of new definitions.

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

First, you need to be aware that there are different definitions and concepts. Second, you have to listen to the experts.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

I recall a conference in pure mathematics, where I understood nothing.

Interactions: Alba Diz-Muñoz

Posted on by
Reply

Alba Diz-Muñoz is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. The Diz-Muñoz group studies the crosstalk between mechanical properties and signalling processes that drive morphogenetic processes and fate specification in immune cells, embryonic stem cells and zebrafish embryos.

What did you train in? 

I did a PhD between developmental biology and biophysics and a postdoc between biophysics and bioengineering.

What are you working on now?

The lab now is a mix of it all, we try to understand the crosstalk between mechanical properties and signalling processes that drive morphogenesis and fate specification in immune cells, embryonic stem cells and zebrafish embryos.

What did you find most difficult when you started working in an area out of your comfort zone?

Understanding the jargon and communicating efficiently. Even though we were all speaking English sometimes I felt like conversations took place in a language I did not know.

Also, initially it was hard for me to identify the important questions in the field

And what did you find most helpful to familiarize yourself with new concepts and jargon?

Find a patient collaborator that is open to explaining the concepts at a level you can follow but is also ready to elaborate further once you can stand on your feet in the field.

Tell us about your experience the first time you went to a conference outside the field you trained in.

In the beginning I could only follow the introductory slides of every talk and then I would totally get lost on the actual research and its details. It was hard because I was not used to that. Only after years I was able to be critical with the presented work.

What are the main challenges and the main advantages of working in an interdisciplinary team?

The biggest challenge for me is to make sure everybody is on the same page and we are all able to understand the concepts each team member uses. The main advantage would be to have very different ways of thinking approach the same problem, often an interdisciplinary group will come up with a much more original solution!

What would be your advice to a PI leading an interdisciplinary group?

Pick the best individuals from each file and create an environment where people are not afraid to say “I don’t understand this” so that communication is as efficient as possible.

Do you find it particularly difficult to obtain funding? Or to get your research published?

So far this has not been a problem but give me some more years and I will have more datapoints.

Interactions: Zala Lenarcic

Posted on by
Reply

Zala is a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, trying to understand which unexpected properties of interacting systems can be triggered by non-equilibrium dynamics. She won a Nature Reviews Physics poster prize at the Quantum Dynamics of Disordered Interacting Systems conference that took place in Trieste last June.

Can you briefly explain the results for which you got the award? 

The working principle of our suggestion is as elementary as that of a greenhouse. In a greenhouse weak sunlight compensates the energy losses though the windows, leading to a temperature of the interior which is much higher than of the exterior. Similarly, weak driving can activate approximate conservation laws of quantum systems. As an example we studied many-body localized (MBL) systems, characterized by macroscopically many local conservation laws. When isolated from the environment, such systems can exhibit localization up to arbitrary energies. However, due to the presence of phonons MBL does not occur in disordered solids, even if disorder is strong. Our work shows that weak driving can reactivate localization, since it pumps into the local conservation laws and compensates their decay due to coupling to phonons. We propose that MBL can be detected via measurements of local temperatures. The variation of local temperatures serves as a new, experimentally relevant, order parameter of the MBL phase.

What do you hope will be the impact of your research?

Our theory promotes the MBL and integrable systems beyond a pure theoretical discourse of idealized systems. It suggests that in the presence of driving their features are much more robust against seemingly detrimental perturbations. The impact of our work would be increased by an actual experimental confirmation, showing that MBL can indeed survive finite coupling to phonons. A possible application would be tunable properties of certain disordered materials, whose transport would be inhibited by a weak driving. Even higher impact could come from experiments confirming our related study, which suggests that in certain spin chain materials driving can activate spin and heat currents as these are the conservation laws of the XXZ Heisenberg model. That would open the venue for new types of spin and heat pumps.

 What made you want to be a physicist in the first place?

As a child I dreamed of being an astronaut. After having learned some math I realized one does not need to travel to the space; nature can be explored also in much more abstract ways. My fascination from the first classes of physics continues to this day.

 If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

A puppet designer. Puppetry, as an artistic medium, is to certain extend free from the limitations of reality, allowing for creative rethinking. I would be the master of aesthetics, creating beauty with my hand and ideas.

What would be your physics superpower?

Ultra-long coherence of my mind.

 Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Mileva Marić Einstein. I would like to ask her how was it to be a female student at ETH in her time, why she decided to live with a genius and how did she accept her numerous pregnancies at her stage of career. I would like to know how much of her work was never acknowledged. I would like to give her a voice.

Science without borders: A view from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Posted on by
Reply

A guest post by Alak Ray and Prajval Shastri.

After seventy years of the government of independent India nurturing scientific enterprise, even in the face of criticism of its investment in the fundamental sciences, it is a good moment to review the story of what many regard as the prized jewel of them all – the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which was founded in 1945 by the physicist Homi Bhabha with the help of the Dorabji Tata Trust. We are treated to a visit of this famous institute and its history in the book Growing the Tree of Science, Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Oxford Univ Press, New Delhi 2016) written by Indira Chowdhury. The reference to a growing tree in the title came from a Presidential Address by Bhabha in 1963 at the National Institute of Sciences of India: “A scientific institution… has to be grown with great care, like a tree.”

The history of the Institute is distilled from years of effort by Chowdhury to set up the institutional archives of TIFR. She explores the early efforts of scientific institution building around the time of India’s independence in 1947, when science was envisaged as being serviceable to the nation and a tool of nation building, but the need was also recognized to nurture institutional spaces without borders.

The campus of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research around the time of inauguration of its new buildings in January 1962 in south Bombay (now Mumbai). Photo courtesy of the Archives of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Bhabha undertook this nurturing with enthusiasm, even when within a few years of founding the Institute multiple responsibilities left him little time for research. He concentrated on creating the conditions for conducting good research, and sought to entice stellar scientists to visit, and to recruit established scientists who could lead various programmes. A largely unknown initiative by Bhabha was his invitation in 1952 to Richard Feynman “to spend a couple of years or more here as a Professor of Theoretical Physics”, which Feynman declined.

A poignant story of Bhabha’s sense of science without borders concerns the Chinese mathematician S. S. Chern. During the intense civil war in China (1948), Bhabha wrote to Chern at the Mathematical Institute of the Academia Sinica at Nanking, which Chern himself had founded in 1946 after returning from Princeton. Bhabha wrote, “Although we know the patriotism which prompted you to prefer to work in your own country despite the many attractive offers from abroad, we realise that the present conditions must make work in your neighbourhood extremely difficult, if not impossible… I am therefore, writing to you to offer you the hospitality of this institute… to spend one year in the first instance as a Visiting Professor?” By this time Chern had already accepted J. R. Oppenheimer’s offer at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, but was deeply grateful “for the concern of my foreign friends, which has never failed me”.

Bhabha smoothly and successfully recruited the mathematician K. Chandrasekhar in 1948 and the physicist M.G.K. Menon in 1955, though he failed with astrophysicist S. Chandrasekhar. In 1962, he offered George Sudarshan an Associate Professorship. Sudarshan had worked in TIFR’s emulsion group earlier (1952-1955) at the Old Yacht Club. Then, while on leave from TIFR at the University of Rochester, Sudarshan, with his thesis advisor Robert Marshak, worked out the universal V-A theory of weak interactions, for which they were nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times. But the effort to repatriate Sudarshan failed because Bhabha tried putting Sudarshan on par with others who stayed on in the institute and did their research in India. Indeed, Chowdhury writes about Bhabha’s notion of “self-reliance which had instilled in him an unswerving faith in the scientists who had trained at his institute”. She elaborates, “It was this group that had been responsible for growing the roots of the tree of science and Bhabha the master gardener was unwilling to carry out any process of grafting a foreign branch which could potentially disturb the stability of the tree itself.” Chowdhury asks, “The institutional model itself had an unresolved paradox at its core – was it national or international?” She opines that the “ambiguity at the heart of Bhabha’s grand vision presented a troublesome dilemma – how to be international and national at the same time”.

The idea of using modern science for social transformation has been debated among the Indian elite since social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s time in the 1820s. The debate has touched on questions such as: What are the priorities for development? What types of scientific activities are most appropriate for a developing country like India? How can a scientific community be best established within a traditional society? How can scientists working in such a society keep their loyalty to the internationalism of science and at the same time deal with the more local and immediate needs of their own countries? [see “India’s Scientific Development”, William Blanpied, Pacific Affairs, vol 50, 91,1977)]. In the first two decades after India’s independence the international network that Bhabha built worked together with India’s nationalism and was happy to contribute to the development of institutions for a newly independent India. (The most notable scientist in this network was Nobel prize-winning experimentalist P. M. S. Blackett – see “Empire’s Setting Sun?”, Robert Anderson, Econ. Pol. Weekly, vol 36 (39), 3703, 2001). Chowdhury points out, “The sense of national self-realisation and an awareness of international cooperation went hand in hand.”

Bhabha also successfully drew a strong connection between fundamental science and technology development. Bhabha in his letter to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust in 1944 wrote, “It is absolutely in the interest of India to have a vigorous school for research in fundamental physics, not only in the less advanced branches of physics, but also in the problems of immediate practical interest to industry. If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing and of very inferior quality, it is due to the absence of sufficient numbers of outstanding pure research workers who could set the standards for good research.”

Growing the Tree of Science paints the picture of TIFR and its journey of undertaking science in a newly developing nation on a wide canvas. The story however is somewhat less richly textured for the period after Bhabha’s death. Chowdhury does discuss the beginnings of molecular biology, radio astronomy and other disciplines in TIFR with the recruitments of the geneticist Obaid Siddiqi in 1962 and the radio astronomer Govind Swarup in 1963. Her story is however mainly concentrated in the earlier phase of these groups. The hits and misses of the Bhabha era affected TIFR’s later development and the future it looks into. One wishes that a deeper appraisal of the era that followed could be put together in greater detail.

 

About the authors:

Alak Ray is a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (TIFR). Prajval Shastri is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. As young physicists they both arrived at TIFR’s south Mumbai campus in 1981, fifteen years after the Bhabha era.

Interactions: Abigail Klopper

Posted on by
Reply

Abigail Klopper is a Senior Editor at Nature Physics. She previously worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, where she pursued theoretical research in aspects of soft-matter and biological physics.

What made you want to be a physicist?

A love of maths and a distinct (if pretentious) feeling that it was the only truly relevant thing to learn about the Universe. My biggest regret as a nineteen year old was that I wasn’t allowed to double up physics with philosophy. I’d started as a double major in electronic engineering — an insurance policy of sorts — and evidently the faculty thought that that would have made a ridiculous triple.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be?

I come from a family of architects — physics is my rebellion — so I would likely be designing houses had I not gone down this road.

What would be your (physics) superpower?

Time dilation please. I could definitely use a way to squeeze some extra hours out of the day.

What Sci-Fi gadget / technology would you most like to have / see come true?

Anything that could get me back home to the beach in Australia in the time it takes to traverse London.

What is your non-scientifically accurate guilty pleasure?

I do have quite the penchant for vampires — the sassy backtalking type found in Buffy and True Blood over the sappy Twilight variety. I’m fairly sure we’re yet to find evidence of fanged humanoids in our midst.

What would your dream conference be like?

The Physics of Living Matter symposium run by the Universities of Cambridge and Marseille is pretty much my ideal conference. It’s two full days in a room with physicists and biologists who are all really keen to convey their research in a way that meets everyone in the middle. The breadth of topics covered is impressive, and the quality of the students’ presentations is always rather humbling.

Interactions: Magdalena Skipper

Posted on by
Reply

Magdalena Skipper is the Editor in Chief of Nature. She has spent over 15 years working for Nature Research in various roles at Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature, the Nature Partner Journals and Nature Communications.

What did you train in? What areas have you handled for the Nature Research journals over the years?

My background is in genetics. Life sciences fascinated me from an early age, but once I discovered genetics at school I knew this specific discipline was something I wanted to delve into deeper. I studied genetics for my first degree (at the University of Nottingham, in the UK) and then went to do a PhD researching sex determination in a classic genetic model organism – a small round worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Throughout my PhD and postdoc years, I always found using genetics to help answer research questions to be the most elegant and satisfying approach. And it was genetics and genomics that were my core areas as an editor, but since genes and genomes are involved in all aspects of life sciences my focus broadened and I developed an understanding of most, if not all, life science disciplines. More recently, as I took on more senior editorial roles I also began to delve into the physical sciences.

You are the first editor of Nature not coming from a physical sciences background. Do you find this a challenge in championing physical sciences in the pages of Nature?

It is true that to date Nature has had at its helm editors trained mainly in the physical sciences. In my opinion, the most influential paper published by Nature during my predecessor’s tenure was the sequencing of the human genome. I hope that during my time we can publish the greatest and most important advances in any field. Learning is a life-long passion for me and so as I grow my knowledge and appreciation for the physical sciences I also develop a growing enthusiasm for this branch of science.

You led Nature Communications and now Nature. What has that taught you about multidisciplinary journals?

My time as Editor in Chief of Nature Communications has reaffirmed my conviction about the importance of multidisciplinary journals in modern research. It has also taught me to appreciate the challenges and needs of different scientific communities which are often shaped by their very discipline; these discipline-specific needs must be respected, but multidisciplinary journals find themselves in a unique and privileged position to share solutions developed within one field so that they may be adopted (and/or modified) by other fields.

How can we move from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary?

This is a fascinating challenge and an important opportunity. While this transition need not be complete – in so far that some questions may always be answerable without reaching beyond one specific discipline – true interdisciplinary approaches open entirely new avenues of investigation. As so often is the case the transition needs to start with researcher training, and we have seen increasing trend in this direction in a number of academic establishments. We as editors have an important role to play too, by recognising potential in interdisciplinary submissions. Multidisciplinary journals can be perfect incubators, if you like, in which interdisciplinary papers can flourish.

What is your vision on interdisciplinary research in the pages of the Nature Research journals?

Our Nature Research portfolio of journals offers a fantastic environment for championing and disseminating interdisciplinary research. Our classic, discipline-specific journals are complemented by so-called thematic journals; for these multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity lies at the very heart of their editorial scope. And then of course there are the broad scope, multidisciplinary journals like Nature and Nature Communications. What excites me the most is that the breadth of our portfolio allows us to really delve into all aspects of contemporary research questions. Take climate change for example: one can think of research questions the answers to which require approaches from physics, material science, ecology, economics and social sciences, all at the same time. We can and should be increasingly considering more and more work along these lines.

Interactions: Niccolo Somaschi

Posted on by
Reply

Niccolo studied physics at the University of Milano-Bicocca before joining a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD program at the University of Southampton and the FORTH research institute in Greece and then joining the group of Prof. Pascale Senellart at the Centre of Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies (CNRS & Université Paris-Sud) in Paris as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2017 he co-founded Quandela, a spinoff company from the same institute, that  fabricates and commercialises top-class quantum light sources to boost the development of quantum technologies from quantum computation to quantum communication and quantum sensing, and contribute to their spread outside the academic world.

How did you decide to embark on the adventure of creating a start-up? 

The choice of creating Quandela came directly and pretty naturally following the reaction to  the dissemination of some scientific results we achieved in 2016 on a new kind of semiconductor quantum light source, the core technology on which the group of Prof. Pascale Senellart works since 15 years. The reaction of the international quantum optics community was really unexpected: while people at conferences were taking pictures of the results, requests for collaboration were filling Pascale’s email inbox. The performance of our devices was in fact much better than that of the technologies (laser based) that researcher were using on a daily basis for their experiments, which normally last for several hours and in some cases even weeks. Their excitement was due to a simple fact: switching to the new technology would allow them to reduce the measurement’s time to few minutes or hours, allowing the design of more complex experiments to explore new regimes and new science.

As I was directly involved in the development of these devices and excited about the possibility of actively contributing to boost the field of quantum technologies, I tried to explore ways to continue working for the group as a permanent researcher. As for many others postdocs, this route proved to be non-viable. The creation of a self-sustained company aside the research group represented a good choice for two reasons: I could work to improve the technology, and at the same time we could assist the numerous interested researchers by providing them with devices without turning the research group in a fabrication facility. When I went to see Pascale proposing this idea she simply replied with a big smile, which was the best answer I could get.  We then asked Valerian Giesz, who together with Pascale and myself was at the origin of the latest developments, to join us in the project; and this is how the adventure started.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome to start the company? 

I would say that luckily we didn’t really have to face any big challenge. For me, the challenge was more psychological. Compared to the standard academic path, with well-defined projects and a clear progression with bachelor, master, PhD and postdoc, a start-up requires a totally different mind-set. I had to mentally prepare to achieve ‘multi-tasking on multi-domains’; dealing with unexpected, quick changes of any sort (bureaucratic, scientific, legal etc…); learn how to face good and bad news on a daily basis with the consequent sudden mood  changes; cope with uncertainty (“it will fail! No, it will be a success!”, “I will be unemployed soon! No, we will become …”) never knowing on how long it would take to reach our objectives. Besides, Valerian and I didn’t have a permanent position in any university or a job in a company, unlike several other quantum ‘start-uppers’, nor a big investor group that could safely fill our pockets from day zero while we learned how to move the first steps. At the same time, we were self-conscious that we were leaving academia for something that most people would define as ‘crazy science fiction’. But excitement and motivation never lacked and this temporary stressful situation ended when some pieces started to get into place, clearing the path ahead.

Can you share one positive and one negative side of the experience that you weren’t expecting? 

Most probably the negative experience I was not expecting is yet to come — hopefully I may never have to discover it. But surely the positive one is related to the human side of the adventure. In particular the personal relations constantly developing within Quandela, together with new unexpected ones with people we connected with during this first year and new people we keep meeting. Besides, I could not expect at all the great excitement of the first users who are taking advantage of the capabilities of the devices working at full regime; this was the best reward for the hard work of a year.

What are your tips for academics who are thinking of starting their own company? 

Very few tips, but very clear. Discuss with as many people as possible who have launched a company or participated in the process. Listen carefully to all the good, negative and scary stories while focusing on what is your actual final goal. Finally, find someone you trust and share your vision, and actually do it. Because at the end, wherever the adventure may lead, it is always fun to go, and the experience of doing it is already worth the journey.

Finally, what is the origin of the name Quandela?

The toughest part for sure! To quote a colleague, “getting a good name is much harder than finding the ones of my three children”…
We had few months of brainstorming putting down keywords and names, sometimes in a  totally random way; we got some nice ones, but most of them were bad. We got also several names with unwanted, embarrassing double meanings, resulting from mixing French, Italian, English and Greek. But finally Valerian came up with Quandela, and that was it. Because Candela is the unit of measure of light intensity and the word for ‘candle’ in Italian. The micrometre shape of our device is cylindrical, looking indeed like a candle, with quantum light emitted from its top, like a flame. Besides, the actual intensity of the emitted quantum light is one of its top features. Shortly afterwards, while we were in the middle of the process of officially creating the company, we read a report of the European commission on quantum technologies where someone was suggesting a new unit of measure for quantum light…. Quandela.

Interactions: Damian Wozniak

Posted on by
Reply

Damian is a recent theoretical physics graduate. In September he will start his PhD with Dr Anna Posazhennikova at Royal Holloway University of London to work on nonequilibrium dynamics of bosons in optical lattices. The aim is to study the role played by incoherent quasi-particles excited due to nonequilibrium and to study the role of disorder in dynamics, as well as possible thermalisation of superfluid optical lattices. He won a Nature Reviews Physics poster prize at the Condensed Matter Physics in the City conference in London.

Can you briefly explain the results for which you got the award?

The poster was based on work on analysing quantum phase transitions in a system of optical lattice bosons coupled to an array of atomic quantum dots. The hybrid system parallels the Bose-Hubbard model with a single difference of an additional assisted tunnelling via coupling to atomic quantum dots. Using mean field methods we show that the bosonic subsystem still undergoes a Mott-superfluid quantum phase transition. However, unlike in the Bose-Hubbard model transition, the transition boundary can be manipulated.

What do you hope will be the impact of your research?

I do not know enough about the field to say, but I hope it at least gives some thoughts to any of its readers.

What made you want to be a physicist in the first place?

I haven’t fully decided on it yet. At first, I liked doing maths and physics, I wondered what doing physics would lead to. Sometime throughout my A-levels, I decided to pursue physics. Getting better at physics and learning more of it has made it pretty fun and absorbed me more and more into it.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

Mathematician or doing some work involving programming, I like doing both of them.

Which is the development that you would really like to see in the next 10 years?

Different style of physics education. Physics books are hard to read through, the concepts they present are sometimes hard to understand with just what is written in them and different books cover things in different detail. It would be nice to have lectures online or podcast discussions on these books. I would like to see a single book/online course series which goes into varying depth on all physics topics (dependent on if someone is just curious or studying the topic seriously), with accompanying problems, discussions, and projects to push the understanding of students. Also, this series would need to be entirely self-sufficient.

What Sci-Fi gadget or technology would you most like to have / see come true (and why)?

A new electric propulsion engine, one that can be used to leave the surface of Earth: it might make things cheap enough to grab a ticket for a spaceflight around the Earth.