AO’s Short Profile

Antonio grew up in a small town in the center of Sardinia, Italy. He obtained his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pisa, and the master’s degree between Pisa and KU Leuven, in Belgium, as an Erasmus student. In Pisa, he completed his master’s thesis under the supervision of Prof. Donatella Ciampini on optomechanical interactions of a nanomembrane with laser light in a Farby-Perot cavity.

He moved to the University of Geneva for his doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Mikael Afzelius. Here, he worked on solid state quantum memories for quantum communication, composed by lanthanide atoms embedded in a crystalline yttrium orthosilicate host.

The PhD work involved initially the spectroscopy with varying magnetic field of a new material, Yb:YSO, with the discovery of multiple conditions useful for a quantum memory. In particular, clock transitions at zero magnetic field allow particularly long coherence times when addressed with coherent optical and microwave pulses.

He concluded the PhD with the implementation of quantum memory protocols in a Eu:YSO quantum memory, up to the demonstration of storage of time-bin qubits of light.

After a short period as a postdoc in Geneva, he joined the T-REQS experiment in Prof. Francesca Ferlaino’s group. He receives funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation as a Postdoc.Mobility fellow.

AO’s CV at Glance

5/2022 – present	Postdoc in the group of Prof. Francesca Ferlaino at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
2017 – 2021	PhD work supervised by Dr. Mikael Afzelius, with thesis “Rare earth quantum memories: spectroscopy of a new platform and quantum storage implementations”.
2014 – 2016	Master’s degree in physics of matter at University of Pisa. Master thesis “Optical cavity cooling of mechanical modes and non-linear dynamics of a functionalized silicon nitride nanomembrane”, supervised by Prof. Donatella Ciampini..
2009 – 2014	Bachelor’s degree in physics at University of Pisa.

AO’s Dipolar Publications

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AO’s Other Publications

2022
[7]	Multimode capacity of atomic-frequency comb quantum memories, Antonio Ortu, Jelena V Rakonjac, Adrian Holzäpfel, Alessandro Seri, Samuele Grandi, Margherita Mazzera, Hugues de Riedmatten, Mikael Afzelius, Quantum Science and Technology, 7, 035024, 2022. [more]
[6]	Storage of photonic time-bin qubits for up to 20 ms in a rare-earth doped crystal, Antonio Ortu, Adrian Holzäpfel, Jean Etesse, Mikael Afzelius, npj Quantum Information, 8, 1-7, 2022. [more]
[5]	A readout-integrated time-bin qutrit analyzer for echo-based quantum memories, Adrian Holzäpfel, Antonio Ortu, Mikael Afzelius, 2022. [more] [pdf] [doi]
2021
[4]	Optical and spin manipulation of non-Kramers rare-earth ions in a weak magnetic field for quantum memory applications, Jean Etesse, Adrian Holzäpfel, Antonio Ortu, Mikael Afzelius, Physical Review A, 103, 022618, 2021. [more]
2018
[3]	Spectroscopic study of hyperfine properties in Yb 3+ 171: Y 2 SiO 5, Alexey Tiranov, Antonio Ortu, Sacha Welinski, Alban Ferrier, Philippe Goldner, Nicolas Gisin, Mikael Afzelius, Physical Review B, 98, 195110, 2018. [more]
[2]	Simultaneous coherence enhancement of optical and microwave transitions in solid-state electronic spins, Antonio Ortu, Alexey Tiranov, Sacha Welinski, Florian Fröwis, Nicolas Gisin, Alban Ferrier, Philippe Goldner, Mikael Afzelius, Nature materials, 17, 671-675, 2018. [more]
2017
[1]	Model and phase-diagram analysis of photothermal instabilities in an optomechanical resonator, Alessandra Bigongiari, Antonio Ortu, Francesco Fuso, Ennio Arimondo, Riccardo Mannella, Donatella Ciampini, New Journal of Physics, 19, 103008, 2017. [more]