Gaming at the Speed of Light: Dive into the Future of Photonic Computing!

This game was created ahead of the PHOENICS project's completion to spark interest in the research areas the project explores. Calculating at the Speed of Light offers an engaging introduction to the fundamental concepts of photonic computing and can be a valuable tool for complementing school lessons and encouraging hands-on learning in the fields of technology and innovation. Developed by Constanze Störk-Biber and Jochen Stuhrmann for ages 12 and up and available in English for free.

October 2024: Workshop talk in China

Our group member Xinyu Ma attended the Sino-German Workshop on Multiphysics Device Simulation and Hardware-Aware Computing in Xi’an, China, from 11-15 October. She gave an impressive talk about her latest work on photonic neural networks titled: “Photonic neural networks with synaptic and structural plasticity” and joined the discussions about simulation, processor architectures, machine learning, and hardware.

September 2024: PHOENICS project meeting in Berlin

On September 20th, the PHOENICS consortium met at HHI in Berlin to give an overview of their latest results in designing an optical computing architecture. As the project is in the process of being finalized, the consortium outlined the project's final steps and discussed the assembly of a prototype. This brought together all the past few months' work to finalize the hybrid integration of the different chip platforms.

August 2024: 3rd international conference on pysical computing (ICOPC24)

From 26 to 28 August, Heidelberg University warmly welcomed 44 participants. We had 8 inspiring invited keynote talks, 6 submission talks, 17 poster presentations, and an engaging start-up workshop hosted by hei_INNOVATION.

July 2024: uTP4Q project meeting in Heidelberg

Monday and Tuesday we met our project partners from Belgium, Denmarkt, Slovenia and Switzerland here in Heidelberg to present the latest results achieved as part of the uTP4Q project. This two-day meeting provided enough time for a long discussion about new ideas and plans for the next steps of this micro-transfer printing project and also for many informal talks to strengthen the cooperation between the project partners.

June 2024: Exhibition about Gustav Robert Kirchhoff from June till October

In honor of the namesake of our institute, the exhibition "200^th anniversary of Gustav Robert Kirchhoff – His life and work then and now" opened at the University Museum, displaying some of Kirchhoff’s original works and equipment, fascinating hands-on experiments and the opportunity to discover new things. The exhibition was prepared by the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics in collaboration with the Physics Institute and the University Museum.

April 2024: Conference talk at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing

Simone and Oliver attended the SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing conference in National Harbor, Maryland, US. Simone gave a captivating presentation about their recent progress in realizing waveguide-integrated pseudo photon number resolving architectures on the silicon nitride platform. These presented results were developed as part of the BMBF funded PhoQuant project.

April 2024: Girls’ Day

This year our group was visited by 8 girls interested in how light can be used to encrypt information. The girls worked on some small hands-on experiments learning about the polarization of light and had fun encrypting and decrypting their own secret messages. In our labs we showed them the setups we are currently working on and they tried out our quantum key distribution experiment wearing augmented reality glasses.

March 2024: Talk by Dr. Changhyoup Lee on Variational Quantum Eigensolver

Dr. Changhyoup Lee from KRISS (Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science) visited the Neuromorphic Quantumphotonics group to give an interesting talk on Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) for quantum simulation. He presented the core concepts, strategies and methods, and discussed the main limitations. After his talk he also visited our labs and discussed experiments and new ideas with our group members.

March 2024: Proposal Writing Group Seminar in Italy

In a joined workshop of the Münster and Heidelberg part of our group we talked about the basics of writing successful grant proposals. During the time in Italy, new ideas were discussed, and we started writing several proposals in small groups. They will be submitted soon to hopefully win funding for interesting new research projects.

February 2024: Infineon Dissertation Prize for Dr. Shabnam Taherinya

We are proud to announce that our Postdoctoral Researcher, Shabnam, has been awarded the prestigious Infineon Dissertation Prize for her outstanding doctoral thesis titled "Studying the non-equilibrium states in high entropy alloys." Shabnam's research has significantly contributed to the field of materials science, particularly in understanding high entropy alloys' behavior under various conditions such as intensive plastic deformation and irradiation with fast, heavy ions. Her meticulous investigations using advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques have provided valuable insights into the microstructure, inner interfaces, and magnetic properties of these materials.

January 2024: EPIQUE Kickoff Meeting

With a kick-off meeting hosted at the Sapienza University of Rome Rectorate, the EPIQUE challenge began! The research project is led by Sapienza University of Rome and coordinated by Fabio Sciarrino and involving 18 partners from 12 different countries

EPIQUE is one of six projects, based on the same number of technological solutions, designed to physically develop a European quantum computer as part of the Quantum Flagship promoted by the European Commission in 2018 and funded with around EUR 1 billion.