Marco Polini

Research

How do many interacting electrons behave, and how can we use what they do? Four lines of work keep my group busy.

  1. Quantum processors driven by a few global signals

    Superconducting quantum computers usually need a dedicated control line for every qubit, and the wiring becomes the bottleneck long before the physics does. We design architectures in which a handful of global pulses drive the whole chip, with computation steered by engineered ZZ interactions between transmons. This is the scientific core of Planckian, and we have now seen the key ingredient, dynamical blockade between qubits, in the lab.

  2. Light that reshapes matter

    Squeeze light into a cavity much smaller than its wavelength and it can couple strongly to the electrons of a 2D material. Can it change how the material conducts, or even make it superconduct? We work out what such cavities can and cannot do, separating real effects from tempting artefacts of approximate models.

  3. Quantum batteries

    Can quantum mechanics make energy storage faster? We showed that many quantum cells charged together can store energy faster than the same cells charged one by one, and we keep asking where this advantage is genuine and how it could be built in a real device.

  4. Electron fluids and plasmons in 2D materials

    In very clean graphene, electrons collide with each other far more often than with anything else, and they start to behave like a viscous fluid. With Andre Geim’s group we predicted and observed the fingerprints: whirlpools that make the local resistance negative, and flow through narrow constrictions that beats the ballistic limit. The same many-body physics governs plasmons, light bound to electron waves, which we have studied down to their quantum limits.

Other current threads: chirality and spin in twisted 2D materials, the quantum geometry of phonons, and dark matter searches with new detector materials.

Selected publications and the complete lists on arXiv and Google Scholar.