Two young researchers win ERC Starting Grant awards

The Collège de France is delighted to announce the success of two "promising" young researchers who have been awarded grants from the ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant program.

- Sophie Carenco, CNRS research fellow, member of the Matériaux Hybrides et Nanomatériaux research team at the Laboratoire Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris (UPMC/CNRS/Collège de France) headed by Pr Clément Sanchez, for her project Nanoparticles as Partners in Frustrated Lewis Pairs: Boosting the Surface Reactivity of Inorganic Nanoparticles

- Sylvain Nascimbene, member of the Bose-Einstein Condensates research team at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (ENS/UPMC/CNRS/Collège de France) headed by Pr Jean Dalibard for his project Exploring topological matter with atomic Dysprosium

laurent Ardhuin for UPMC

Sophie Carenco, an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique and a doctor from UPMC (2011), is exploring the field of "Nanochemistry", a science at the crossroads of molecular and materials chemistry. After a post-doctorate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California (2012-2013), then a return to France in 2014, at the Collège de France, in Pr. Clément Sanchez's team (Chair of Hybrid Materials Chemistry), she joined the CNRS the same year as Chargée de Recherche.

Her research focuses on the manufacture of metallic nanoparticles, objects containing a few thousand atoms obtained by chemical reactions in organic solvents. She is particularly interested in the incorporation of lighter chemical elements (phosphorus, sulfur, carbon, etc.) into these small pieces of metal: these give them characteristics that are as unexpected as they are interesting, in their interaction with light (band-gap adjustment), with an electric current (electro-catalysis and electrochemical energy storage) or with gases such as carbon dioxide, dihydrogen or nitrogen oxides (catalysis).

His ERC project focuses on the latter aspect: the aim is to build a "molecular clamp" on the surface of nanoparticles which, at 25°C, will be capable of breaking chemical bonds such as carbon-oxygen, hydrogen-hydrogen, etc., and then forming new ones to produce other molecules with higher added value. These molecular pliers will initially be quite fragile, but they may offer a new route to the efficient and inexpensive transformation of abundant molecules under conditions as gentle as those used by the living world.

Sylvain Nascimbene, senior lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, is studying the behavior of gases of Dysprosium atoms cooled to very low temperatures, so that they adopt collective quantum behavior and form original states of matter.

After completing his doctoral thesis at the École Normale Supérieure in Christophe Salomon's group, he spent a post-doctoral period at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (Munich) in Immanuel Bloch's group. In 2011, he joined Prof. Jean Dalibard's team (Atoms and Radiation Chair), which moved to the Collège de France laboratories in 2014.

His research involves the experimental study of gaseous samples of Dysprosium atoms. By manipulating the atoms with laser beams, these systems are cooled so that their collective behavior is governed by the laws of quantum physics. These gases can then be used to create different states of quantum matter, and explore their physical behavior. By analogy, these studies have implications for the understanding of various problems, such as electrical conduction in metals or the interactions between the different constituents of an atomic nucleus.

The ERC project aims to use this experimental device to produce original states of matter, known as topological states. By analogy with topology in mathematics, a topological quantum system has a singular property: some of its physical characteristics retain a well-defined value over time, even if the system is perturbed from the outside. This type of state of matter could be used to define high-precision physical standards. It could also be used to resolve the extreme sensitivity to the environment of systems used for quantum information.