Excellent Prizes for outstanding SNI doctoral students Swiss Nanotechnology PhD Award Young Researcher Award Dr. Thomas Mortelmans, a former doc- Former SNI doctoral student Dr. Alex- toral student at the SNI PhD School, was ina Ollier was presented with a Young presented with one of five PhD Awards at Researcher Award at the Interna- In 2022, former SNI doctoral stu- the Swiss NanoConvention 2022. tional Vacuum Congress 2022 in Sap- dent Thomas Mortelmans won Mortelmans received the award, poro (Japan). She received the award, one of the Swiss Nanotechnology which was sponsored by Sensirion, in rec- which is sponsored by Canon Anelva PhD Awards. ognition of a first-author publication in Corporation, for her presentation on the journal ACS Applied Nanomaterials the electronic properties of single- in which he described the development layer free graphene sheets. As part of of a novel functional principle for rapid her SNI-supported doctoral disserta- Covid-19 tests. The principle can also be tion, Alexina worked with atomically used to determine the status of the dis- thin compounds of this kind and in- ease or to detect other viruses, such as vestigated energy losses in various influenza A. two-dimensional materials. Report: http://bit.ly/3YMgmy8 Report: http://bit.ly/3lv3Tk7 Video about publication: Video: https://youtu.be/gzlXDVMMDd0 https://youtu.be/7VKskNZCoMc Video about the SNI PhD School: https://youtu.be/9dqX_vimmcY Former SNI doctoral student Alexina Ollier received a Young Researcher Award. SPS Award In 2022, the Swiss Physical Society (SPS) presented the SPS Award related to Me- trology, which was sponsored by METAS, to the former SNI doctoral student Dr. Thomas Karg. Karg and his colleagues observed strong coupling between a nanomechan- ical oscillator and an atomic spin ensem- ble for the first time. They did so by adopt- Former SNI doctoral student ing an innovative approach that used light Thomas Karg won an SPS Award. to couple the two systems over a macro- scopic distance. Published in the journal Science, these results pave the way for new applications ranging from quantum metrology and networking to quantum feedback experiments and coherent links between quantum processors. Report: http://bit.ly/3xlznvD 20 SNI Annual Report 2022