Functional Quantum Materials Laboratory

Novel materials are a key for innovation driving novel applications and technological breakthroughs. Particularly, the quantum nature of materials provides a new route towards innovative materials and devices with unprecedented properties which are a prerequisite for quantum technologies. It is indeed the quantum nature of matter which manifests in the emergence of superconductivity, magnetism, ferroelectricity and related phenomena such as quantum liquids, charge density waves, multiferroelectric and topological effects, which can bring information and energy-saving technologies to a new level. The project will identify, investigate, and tune materials whose useful properties are governed by quantum cooperative effects. These phenomena often evolve from the interplay of competing degrees of freedom so that, for the development of technologies based on quantum materials, their parameters are to be controlled which in the project will be realized by chemical substitutions as well as pressure, electric and magnetic fields.