Sarah Embacher

We are proud to announce that Eva Casotti has won first place in the Euregio Young Researcher Award 2025.

Now in its 14th edition, the award invited young researchers from the Euregio region (Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino) to submit their work on the theme “Competitiveness and the Euregio as a Business Location.”

During the final round at the Euregio Days 2025 in Alpbach, the finalists presented their research to a jury of leading experts from research institutions across all three Euregio regions. Eva convinced the jury with our work on “Observation of vortices in a dipolar supersolid”, carried out at the IQOQI in Innsbruck and University of Innsbruck, and recently published in Nature.

The award was presented by Arno Kompatscher (Governor of South Tyrol), Anton Mattle (Governor of Tyrol), and Simone Marchiori (Regional Minister from Trentino). Please click here to find more information about the event.

Congratulations to Eva on this outstanding achievement!

Congratulations to Lauritz Klaus who successfully defended his PhD thesis! Lauritz did some amazing work on supersolids and vortices in the Er-Dy lab. He is well-known for always bringing a good mood into the group, fantastic jokes and eating huge amounts of yoghurt. He is now a PostDoc in the Erbium lab if Rob Smith in Oxford. Goodbye and we wish you all the best for your future, Lauritz!

From July 9-11, the 2025 edition of the Young Atom Opticians Conference (YAO) took place here in Innsbruck!

A huge thank you goes out to Clemens Ulm and Eva Casotti, PhD students from our group, and Johanna Hennebichler and Alberto Canali, PhD students from Rudi Grimms group, for organizing the event.

We also want to thank all speakers, participants and sponsors. The week was packed with insightful talks, poster sessions, social events, a gender equality talk, a startup panel, industry presentations, and lab tours.

For more information about YAO 2025, including a full list of the invited speakers, partner institutions and sponsors, visit https://yao.iqoqi.at/. If you are interested in hosting YAO 2027, contact us via yao2025@oeaw.ac.at.

On a nice summer evening, our group enjoyed cold drinks and delicious food together with familiy & friends.

The highlights of the evening were a pot of Zaziki and the impressive skills of the Er-Dy team of organizing the BBQ grill in time. Most notably, Leonardo won against Clemens in the final round of an epic pingpong tornament that showcased both impressive skills in the sport as well as astonishing trick shots (accompanied by the permanent threat of FF’s dog Pincho stealing the pingpong ball).