The School of Basic Sciences at EPFL anticipates making a faculty appointment at the level of tenure- track Assistant Professor or tenured Associate Professor in its Institute of Physics (IPHYS), but in exceptional cases, appointments at the Full Professor level may be considered.

The successful candidate is expected to strengthen and complement the existing research program in observational astrophysics and cosmology by establishing an internationally recognized activity.

Recent advances in our ability to generate and manipulate quantum-coherent matterwaves is now ushering in a new era of quantum optics, where the roles of matter and light are almost exactly reversed. We are starting to be able to create almost arbitrary matterwave-images, (de)magnify, and project them. Matterwave mirrors, lenses and cavities are rapidly becoming reality. We have recently even been able to demonstrate a coherent waveguide for matterwaves.

In the nanoLace project, we are going to build a novel type of matterwave lithography experiment, where we will exploit the fact that time-dependent matterwave lenses will enable us to reduce the wavelength of matterwaves by orders of magnitude. We expect to be able to generate arbitrary patterns as small as a few nanometres. Potential applications stretch from the fundamental (quantum-matterwave-optics) to the industrial (micro-chip production with nanometric structures). To this end we are now in the process of setting up a novel matterwave lithography machine based on Bose-Einstein Condensates. The project is fully financed in the framework of the EU Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) network nanoLace.