Four SNSF Ambizione grants awarded in Physics

The highly selective Ambizione program is aimed at young researchers who wish to conduct, manage and lead an independent project at a Swiss higher education institution. The awarded projects are funded for a maximum of four years. This year, SNSF has awarded 34 grants in the category “Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics”. Four of these have gone to physicists who will perform their project at IPHYS:

Elena Graverini, presently a postdoc at the LPHE-LS, will carry out her project “From beauty to strangeness: a flavour approach to probing new interactions”. She proposes a novel approach to challenge the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, using quark-level decays to probe the SM assumption that lepton interactions are flavour-independent. This test will be performed for the first time at a hadron collider B-factory, the LHCb experiment. She will also develop a new idea to perform real-time neutrino and hidden sector physics at a new experiment, to be built and operated at the Large Hadron Collider: SND@LHC.

Johann Riemensberger, presently a postdoc at LPQM, will perform his project “Ultra-low loss photonic integrated circuits for advanced applications in telecommunication and sensing”. He will be using ultra-low loss Si₃N₄ photonic waveguide technologies that have recently been developed at EPFL. The goals are to demonstrate novel functionality such as continuous wave optical parametric amplification and devices for applications in parallel coherent 3D imaging with high pixel measurement rates and the next generation of optical information technologies with increased optical bandwidth.

Aris Tritsis, currently apost-doctoral researcher at the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics of the Australian National University, will join the LASTRO to perform his project “HOMERIC-Halo's magnetic field as evident from striated interstellar clouds”. His main challenge will be to construct the first-ever 3D atlas of the strength and orientation of the plane-of-sky component of the Galactic magnetic field using a novel technique, suitable for tomographic measurements. He will also try to unveil the role of the magnetic field in the formation and evolution of molecular clouds and cores through 3D nonideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations.

Oliver Müller, currently apostdoc at LASTRO, will perform his project “Probing the standard model of cosmology with dwarf galaxies”. He will extend observations of the abundance and distribution of dwarf galaxies to over 500 other nearby galaxy groups to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies.