Technion’s Ron Tenne Awarded ERC Grant for Research Innovation

Dr. Ron Tenne has been awarded a prestigious starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC). These highly competitive ERC grants, each totaling €1.5 million, are designed to support promising early-career scientists in advancing their research, building research teams, and pursuing bold and original ideas. Applicants are required to demonstrate strong potential for scientific breakthroughs, exceptional ambition, and the feasibility of their proposed research. In total, 478 grants were awarded this year, with a combined value of €761 million.

Dr. Tenne, an assistant professor in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and a member of both the Helen Diller Quantum Center and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, received the grant for his research proposal, which aims to strengthen the connection between quantum optics and nanotechnology. Quantum optics deals with optical phenomena that require consideration of photons – the fundamental particles that make up light. A central challenge in this field is that scientists have only managed to generate a handful of quantum states of light so far.

In his research, Dr. Tenne aims to utilize nanoparticles to create new quantum states of light – even those that have not been previously conceived. One of the intriguing questions in this context is whether such particles could be used to sense our environment on extremely small spatial and temporal scales, using quantum sensing techniques. Dr. Tenne’s research group is developing methods to detect individual electrons flowing in a circuit using a nearby nanoparticle that “reports” on them.

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