Prestigious ERC Synergy Grant “UnMySt” for MPSD’s Theory Department

MPSD Director Angel Rubio along with an elite team of world-renowned scientists— Tal Schwartz (Tel Aviv University), Thomas Ebbesen (University of Strasbourg), and Abraham Nitzan (University of Pennsylvania)—has been awarded a highly competitive ERC Synergy Grant valued at €10 million. This funding will support their research into the electromagnetic effects in molecular systems under strong light-matter coupling, a field at the cutting edge of chemistry and quantum physics.
Michael Ruggenthaler and Dominik Sidler, both Group Leaders in Rubio’s team, will play a central role in achieving the ambitious goals of this project.

An ERC Synergy Grant is one of the most prestigious and competitive awards given by the European Research Council (ERC) and is evaluated on the sole criterion of scientific excellence. This grant exclusively supports highly ambitious projects that can only be accomplished through the interdisciplinary and joint effort of two to four Principal Investigators tackling a particularly challenging and potentially ground-breaking research goal. The "Unravelling the Mysteries of Vibrational Strong Coupling" (UnMySt) project received €10 million for a six-year term.

UnMySt is an international collaboration uniting leading experimental and theoretical research groups, coordinated by Tal Schwartz at Tel Aviv University, Israel. The team of Principal Investigators includes Abraham Nitzan from the University of Pennsylvania (U.S.), Thomas Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg (France), and Angel Rubio from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Germany.
In Hamburg, Rubio’s team will be joined by Michael Ruggenthaler, a Research Group Leader at MPSD, and Dominik Sidler, an MPSD Group Leader based at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

The scientific context of UnMySt lies within the emerging field of polaritonic chemistry, which integrates chemistry with cavity quantum electrodynamics. By controlling the quantum properties of the light field, the traditional rules of chemistry can be bent and new chemical effects can be engineered.      
Rubio’s department focuses on the field of theory and modelling of electronic and structural properties in condensed matter and on developing novel theoretical tools and computational codes to investigate the how materials react upon coupling to an electromagnetic field. A specific focus lies on the response of matter due to quantized electromagnetic fields and how the quantized nature of the electromagnetic field can be used to control material properties. This knowledge will be key in the UnMySt Synergy Project, and the MPSD team will especially contribute with its expertise on mathematical (Michael Ruggenthaler) and theoretical (Dominik Sidler) modelling of such novel light-matter coupling situations.

According to project leaders in Hamburg, the UnMySt project aims to investigate how tailored electromagnetic environments affect chemical and physical processes within molecular systems under "strong light-matter coupling" conditions. The researchers expect that this work will yield fundamental insights into these novel interactions, paving the way for breakthroughs with wide-ranging implications for chemistry and materials science.

This award marks the third ERC Grant for Angel Rubio, following two previous ERC Advanced Grants: "DYNamo" (2011-2016) and "QSpec-NewMat" (2016-2021).
The ERC selected 57 projects out of 548 proposals (a 10.4% success rate) to receive a total of €571 million. This funding spans a variety of complex scientific challenges across 24 countries in Europe and beyond, reflecting the ERC's mission to support frontier research and foster innovation.