Physicist Gabriele Grosso Wins $1.35 Million Moore Award to Turn Quantum Noise Into a Resource

In a field where scientists spend enormous effort shielding delicate quantum systems from the slightest disturbance, one physicist is asking a provocatively different question: what if the disturbance itself could be put to work? Gabriele Grosso, a professor with the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and a physics professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, has been named one of 21 mid-career scientists joining the 2026 cohort of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative. The honor comes with a five-year, $1.35 million award that will fund an unconventional research program in quantum science, one that aims to transform the tiny molecular vibrations inside solid materials from a nuisance to be eliminated into a functional tool for controlling quantum information.

The announcement, made on October 2, 2026, positions Grosso’s laboratory to take on a challenge that sits at the heart of one of the most stubborn obstacles in quantum technology. Quantum devices, from experimental quantum computers to prototype quantum sensors, exploit the strange behavior of matter at extremely small scales, where particles can exist in superpositions of states and become entangled with one another across distances. These behaviors underpin the promise of radically new approaches to computing, communication, and sensing. Yet the same fragility that makes quantum states so powerful also makes them extraordinarily vulnerable. Heat, stray electromagnetic fields, and above all vibrations, the ceaseless microscopic jiggling of atoms within any material, can scramble quantum information in a process known as decoherence. The standard strategy has been isolation: suspend atoms in vacuum, cool systems to near absolute zero, and engineer barriers between the quantum system and its noisy environment.

Grosso’s team intends to flip that logic on its head. Rather than treating localized molecular vibrations embedded within solid materials as noise to be suppressed, the researchers will investigate whether those vibrations can be deliberately built into quantum systems and harnessed as a resource for controlling, transferring, and storing quantum information. In the vocabulary of condensed matter physics, these vibrations are related to phonons, quantized modes of mechanical motion that propagate through crystal lattices. In many quantum platforms, phonons are the enemy, the channel through which energy leaks out of carefully prepared quantum states. Grosso’s program asks whether, under the right conditions and with the right materials, that same channel can be tamed, shaped, and directed, so that mechanical motion becomes an asset rather than a liability.

The experimental focus will fall on a remarkable class of materials known as wide-bandgap nitrides, semiconductors that are already familiar to industry thanks to their role in light-emitting diodes and power electronics. Within these crystals, certain defects, atomic-scale imperfections in the otherwise regular lattice, can behave as highly complex miniature quantum systems. In a single nanostructure, the electronic states of such a defect can interact with light, with electrical charge, and with the molecular vibrations of the surrounding lattice. This intimate coupling of optical, electronic, and mechanical degrees of freedom within one nanoscale object is precisely what makes these defects interesting for Grosso’s purposes: they offer a natural laboratory in which vibrations and quantum information coexist and communicate.

To interrogate these systems, Grosso and his team will deploy advanced laser and spectroscopy techniques capable of studying individual defects one at a time. Single-defect spectroscopy is a demanding craft, requiring the ability to isolate the optical signature of one nanoscale imperfection amid billions of atoms and to track how its quantum states evolve in response to controlled perturbations. By measuring how molecular vibrations interact with the electronic and optical properties of individual defects, the researchers hope to determine whether those vibrations can be precisely controlled. Success would open the door to using vibrations as new handles for manipulating quantum information, potentially reducing errors in quantum operations and encoding more information within a single quantum system than would otherwise be possible.

The choice of wide-bandgap nitrides carries a second, potentially transformative advantage: compatibility with existing semiconductor manufacturing and the possibility of quantum functionality at or near room temperature. Most leading quantum computing platforms today rely on elaborate cryogenic cooling, with dilution refrigerators holding processor chips at temperatures colder than deep space. That infrastructure imposes enormous costs in money, energy, and complexity, and it remains one of the practical barriers separating laboratory demonstrations from widely deployable quantum technologies. If quantum defects in nitride semiconductors can perform useful quantum operations without such cooling, the result could be a dramatic simplification of the hardware required for quantum devices, bringing them closer to real-world applications in sensing, communication, and computation.

Grosso expressed both gratitude and ambition upon receiving the award. “I’m incredibly excited and honored to receive this award,” he said. “It gives our lab the freedom to pursue a new direction and ask a fundamental question about quantum materials: Can we learn to control and turn vibrations that are often viewed as obstacles into something useful? The Moore award will allow us to take risks, develop new experimental capabilities, and follow the science wherever it leads.” That emphasis on risk is not incidental. The Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative was designed specifically to provide sustained, flexible funding to mid-career physicists pursuing ambitious research, giving them the freedom to take scientific risks, develop new approaches, and pursue unexpected findings in ways that conventional grant structures rarely permit.

The program’s reach is now substantial. With nearly 100 investigators at work across the initiative, funded projects span condensed matter physics, fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, quantum information science, soft matter, and atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Theodore Hodapp, program director for the initiative, framed the philosophy behind the program: “With nearly 100 investigators now at work, we are seeing the range of bold, original science we hoped this Initiative would make possible. From the start, our aim has been to accelerate progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving brilliant mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely can. That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways.”

Colleagues at the CUNY ASRC see the award as a validation of the institution’s research culture. Andrea Alù, founding director of the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative and Distinguished Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, praised the originality of the funded work. “Professor Grosso’s award recognizes both the originality of his research and his willingness to challenge conventional thinking,” Alù said. “This is exactly the kind of fundamental, high-risk research that can open entirely new directions in photonics and quantum science, in line with the overarching goals of our Photonics Initiative. We are excited to see where he and his team take this work.” Notably, Grosso is the second researcher from the Photonics Initiative to receive a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator award. Matthew Sfeir, then a professor with the initiative, received the honor in 2023 for research into the infrared and terahertz properties of novel organic materials and their potential use in advanced photonic and quantum technologies.

For Grosso, the award’s flexibility will enable his laboratory to build and carry out first-of-a-kind experiments combining advanced optical and quantum-control techniques to probe quantum systems with unprecedented capabilities. The broader intellectual stakes are considerable: if localized molecular vibrations in solids can indeed be controlled and repurposed, scientists would gain a new set of building blocks for quantum technologies, drawn from a form of motion that generations of researchers have worked diligently to suppress. Whether that vision materializes will depend on years of careful single-defect experiments, but the Moore Foundation’s investment reflects a bet that the boldest questions in experimental physics, the ones that challenge conventional wisdom about what counts as signal and what counts as noise, are precisely the ones worth funding.

Subject of Research: Harnessing localized molecular vibrations in wide-bandgap nitride semiconductor defects as a controllable resource for quantum information technologies

Article Title: Gabriele Grosso named 2026 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator

Article References: Gabriele Grosso named 2026 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Gabriele Grosso, Moore Foundation, Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative, quantum information, phonons, molecular vibrations, wide-bandgap nitrides, semiconductor defects, single-defect spectroscopy, room-temperature quantum systems, CUNY ASRC, photonics