CUNY physicist wins $1.35M Moore Foundation award to harness quantum vibrations

Gabriele Grosso, a physicist at the CUNY Graduate Center, has won a five-year, $1.35 million award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to pursue an idea that runs against decades of quantum research orthodoxy: stop trying to eliminate the tiny vibrations that plague quantum systems, and learn to use them instead.

Grosso is one of 21 mid-career scientists selected this year for the Moore Foundation's Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative, a program designed to give researchers the kind of sustained, flexible funding that allows them to take scientific risks and follow unexpected results. The award recognizes both the ambition of his work and his willingness to question fundamental assumptions about how quantum materials behave. "It gives our lab the freedom to pursue a new direction and ask a fundamental question," Grosso said of the grant. "Can we learn to control and turn vibrations that are often viewed as obstacles into something useful?"

Quantum technologies promise revolutionary advances in computing, communication, and sensing by harnessing the strange behavior of matter at atomic scales. But quantum systems are fragile. Vibrations, heat, and other disturbances from the environment can corrupt the delicate quantum states that make these systems work, so researchers have traditionally tried to isolate quantum systems from their surroundings as completely as possible. Grosso's team is taking the opposite approach. They will investigate whether localized molecular vibrations embedded within solid materials can be built into quantum systems and used as a resource for controlling, transferring, and storing quantum information—essentially converting what has always been treated as noise into a functional tool.

The research will focus on tiny defects inside wide-bandgap nitride semiconductors. These defects behave as miniature quantum systems in which electronic states, light, electrical charge, and molecular vibrations can all interact within a single nanostructure. Using advanced laser and spectroscopy techniques, Grosso's team will study these defects one at a time to understand how molecular vibrations interact with electronic and optical properties, and whether those vibrations can be precisely controlled. If they can, the vibrations could provide new ways to manipulate quantum information, reduce errors, and pack more information into a quantum system.

There is a practical dimension to this research that extends beyond fundamental physics. The semiconductor materials Grosso's team is studying could potentially be compatible with existing manufacturing processes and could support quantum functions at or near room temperature. Most quantum systems today require cooling to near absolute zero using expensive cryogenic equipment. If Grosso's approach works, it could dramatically reduce the cost, energy consumption, and infrastructure required to build and operate quantum devices, making quantum technologies far more practical for real-world applications. This possibility has drawn attention from Andrea Alù, founding director of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center's Photonics Initiative, who called the work "exactly the kind of fundamental, high-risk research that can open entirely new directions in photonics and quantum science."

Grosso is the second researcher from the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative to receive a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator award. Matthew Sfeir, then a professor with the initiative, received the award in 2023 for research on the infrared and terahertz properties of novel organic materials and their potential applications in quantum technologies.

The Moore Foundation's Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative now supports nearly 100 researchers across a wide range of fields, from condensed matter physics to nuclear physics to soft matter. The program's director, Theodore Hodapp, described the initiative's purpose as accelerating progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely provide. "That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways," Hodapp said.

For Grosso, that freedom will enable his lab to build and carry out experiments that combine advanced optical and quantum-control techniques to probe quantum systems with unprecedented precision. The work represents a fundamental shift in how scientists think about quantum materials—a shift from viewing vibrations as obstacles to be overcome toward seeing them as potential building blocks for the quantum technologies of the future.