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Progetto EMPEROR: materiali innovativi per le

tecnologie quantistiche del futuro

EMPEROR project: innovative materials for quantum technologies of the future

The extended partnership NQSTI (National Quantum Science and Technology Institute), funded by the Italian
government and the European Union through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), set up to
have a consortium of Italian bodies carrying out competitive and frontier research in the field of quantum
sciences and technologies, recently called for tenders to fund research projects that would complement
the activities already underway. One of these projects, co-ordinated by Prof. Marco Gibertini of the Unimore
Department of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics, called EMPEROR, ‘EMergent toPological states in
sEmiconductor-ferROmagnet van der Waals heteRostructures’, was the winner. EMPEROR focuses on a very
special class of materials, called ‘topological’ materials, that can become excellent conductors with excep-
tional properties. These aspects make topological materials particularly promising for various applications,
including of course quantum science and technology. What currently limits their use is that these materials
are rather rare. The EMPEROR project aims to overcome these limitations by exploiting two key aspects:on
the one hand, the predictive power of simulations, which combine the computing power of the most modern
high-performance supercomputers with the laws of quantum mechanics to predict the behaviour of materi-
als. On the other, the aim is to exploit the fact that topological properties can be emergent, i.e. that they can
appear from the combination of materials that taken individually would be ‘trivial’.

e scienze e tecnologie quan- striale mondiale.
tistiche puntano a sfruttare il In questo contesto è nato il partenariato
comportamento peculiare dei esteso NQSTI (National Quantum Science

sistemi descritti dalla mecca- and Technology Institute), finanziato dal Go-
Lnica quantistica per realizzare verno italiano e dall’Unione europea tramite
dispositivi (sensori, strumenti di comunicazione e il Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza
computazione) con caratteristiche irrealizzabili in (PNRR), per avere un consorzio di enti italiani
sistemi ‘classici’, costituendo quindi un potenziale che effettuano ricerca competitiva e di frontiera
punto di svolta nel paradigma tecnologico e indu-
nel campo delle scienze e tecnologie quantistiche,

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