Lorenzo Piroli, researcher in Theoretical physics at the University of Bologna and associate to the Bologna Unit Section and member of the Iniziativa Specifica “Quantum”, has won one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2023, assigned by the European Research Council.

After completing his PhD at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Lorenzo has worked as a post-doc researcher at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Since May 2023, he is researchers and teacher in the theoretical group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna and associate to INFN.

His scientific activity is carried on in the field of physics of quantum many body systems and of quantum information and computation. The main objective of the research project, for which he has obtained funds for about 1,4 million euro, is to identify new and potentially exotic effects relevant for the theoretical many body description of the present day prototypes of quantum computers. The project will focus on the theoretical study of new out-of-equilibrium phases of matter, which might be observable already in present quantum simulation platforms. 

Lorenzo’s research project will last 5 years and has the secondary objective of reinforcing the collaborations that have been recently established among different groups of quantum information and quantum many body physics. It is one of the 400 research projects that has won an ERC Staring Grant (out of more than 2500 submitted) and the only one in the field of fundamental constituents of matter (PE2) allocated to an Italian institution.