Contact information

Institute of Fundamental Physics (CSIC). C/Serrano 113 bis, CP 28006, Madrid, office 106

About me: I am a theoretical physicists working currently at the interface of quantum optics, condensed-matter, and quantum technologies. My group works in developing novel hybrid quantum optical systems that can lead to radically different phenomena from conventional setups as well as novel quantum technological applications.

Short bio: I graduated in Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2008, and did both the Master (2009) and PhD studies (2009-2013) in the Theoretical Condensed Matter department of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid under the supervision of Prof. Carlos Tejedor. After that I moved to the Theory Division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, led by Prof. J. I. Cirac, as a post-doctoral researcher where I spent 5 years. Since August 2018, I am a permanent Research Scientist, affiliated to the Quantum Information and Foundation group (QUINFOG) at the Institute of Fundamental Physics (IFF) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC).

Latest news from our group!

May 2025: Joan Agustí joins the group as a post-doctoral researcher. He will work in the Quantera project MOLAR and related topics. Welcome Joan!
April 2025: The last work of Iñaki García-Elcano's phd is finally published in Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.123602
March 2025: Our proposal of photonic gate with two-level emitters is finally published: https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/pdf/10.1103/PRXQuantum.6.010342,! First work of Tomás Levy's PhD thesis!
Febraury 2025: Our pre-print on Fermionic quantum simulators is finally out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05067, great collaboration with Peter Zoller et al.
January 2025; Our analysis of programmable statregies for multi-photon generation is out: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/nanoph-2024-0640/html
November 2024: Daniel González-Cuadra starts the out-going phase of his Marie Curie Fellowship in the group of Misha Lukin (Harvard).
July 2024: First ore-print from our new PhD student Tomás Levy-Yeyati: arXiv: 2407.06283
June 2024: Two more pre-prints from the Nanoquco collaboration with the groups of at IFIMAC-UAM: arXiv:2406.13042 & arXiv:2405.15361
May 2024: One more paper from Carlos Vega's Phd, now topological amplification in driven-dissipative scenarios: arXiv:2405.10176
April 2024: Cosimo Rusconi starts the out-going phase of his Marie Curie Fellowship in the group of Ana Asenjo (Columbia University)
February 2024: Iñaki Garcia-Elcano defended his PhD! Congrats Iñaki! Luckily, we'll have him around for a few more months before his post-doc move!
January 2024: Our review "Light-matter interactions in quantum nanophotonics devices" is finally online in Nature Reviews Physics. Nice collaboration between our group, Prof. García-Vidal (UAM), and Prof. Reiserer (MPQ).
December 2023: Our group is funded with a Quantera project: "MOLAR: MOlecular Lattice Quantum ElectRodynamics" . Together with the groups of Prof. Amo (CNRS), Prof. Toninelli (CNR), and Tomáš Neuman (Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences) we will explore collective quantum optical effects in a new platform combining polariton lattices and molecular emitters.
October 2023: Erik Petrovish Navarro succesfully defended his PhD in Universidad Nacional de Colombia. This is the second PhD student that defended while the group was established in Madrid.
September 2023: Senlin Yue and Jorge Sánchez join with a JAE Intro to the group.
September 2023: Both Angel and Enrique succesfully defended her Master Project in UCM and UIMP, respectively! We wish them the best of luch in their next move!
August 2023: Our first 100% Nanoquco paper is finally published in PRL! Congrats Cristian and Alberto and the rest of the group!
June 2023: Our paper with Iñaki, Jaime and Jorge about probing and harnessing Fermi arcs is finally online in Science Advances!
May 2023: We are part of the organization comittee of two conferences: Quantum Matter conference in Madrid and the Topological Photonics Workshop 2023!
April 2023: The second paper of Carlos Vega's PhD finally published in Phys. Rev. Research! Congratulations Carlos!
February 2023: We are very happy to post our first work on variational waveguide QED simulators led by Cristian Tabares & Alberto Muñoz. Stay tuned for new results on the topic!
February 2023: Exciting news! My proposal to engineer analogue simulators of twisted optical lattices is realized experimentally and published in Nature! I wrote a review on the subject.
December 2022: Javier and me are awarded the RSEF-BBVA prize for best divulgative article of the RSEF journal: what a nice closing for his PhD.
October 2022: Javier succesfully defended his PhD! I am so proud of him! We wish him the best for his career.
October 2022: The third paper of Iñaki's phd is on arXiv: we show how to probe Fermi arcs by coupling emitters to Weyl photonic systems, and find new chiral quantum optical regimes with them.
September 2022: First paper of Cristian's PhD is published in PRA. We show how to obtain tunable spin-1 photon-mediated applications in a collaboration with the group of Prof. Zohar from Hebrew University.
July 2022: Second paper of the PhD of Carlos Vega is finally out! We show the emergence of a topological multi-mode waveguide QED by coupling emitters to large Chern number insulators!
June 2022: Our collaboration with the groups of Jacqueline Bloch and Alberto Amo testing demonstrating reconfigurable photon localization is published!
April 2022: We take a new group picture with the QUINFOG group!
March 2022: Month of collaborations! We have submited three works in collaboration with several groups: one about metastable behaviour in quantum optical systems with Carlos Sanchez Muñoz's group, one about metasurfaces with Arroyo-Huidobro's group, and one with Javier and Daniel González Cuadra about tuning RKKY interactions!
March 2022: Some of our summer papers get published. The work by Miguel Bello about many-body phases in waveguide QED in Phys. Rev. X Quantum, and the one by David Fernandez about tunable quantum metasurfaces in Phys, Rev. Letters, not bad for a JAE project!
February 2022: New paper by Álvaro Gómez-León and Tomas Ramos about introducing decimation techniques to study driven-dissipative chains.
February 2022: Alberto Muñoz de las Heras joins our group as a post-doc after defending his PhD thesis in Carusotto's group. Welcome back to Madrid! Also Tomas Levy-Yeyati starts his three-month internship in the group.
December 2021: I submit my first single-author paper about how to optically-defined cavities in driven-dissipative photonic lattices. This is also accompanied by the experimental confirmation of such phenomena through a collaboration with Alberto Amo's & Jacqueline Bloch's groups.
November 2021: I am awarded the Miguel Catalan prize 2021 for researchers under 40 in the Comunidad de Madrid!
November 2021: A new PhD joins our group within the NanoQuCo project: Welcome Cristian Tabares!
October 2021: Some of our latest papers get finally published: QED of anisotropic Dirac points, Qubit-photon bound states in extended SSH models, and photon-mediated interactions in Dirac photonic Crystals!
August 2021: First paper of our collaboration with our colleague and friend from the Hebrew University Erez Zohar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13024!
July 2021: The Synergy project from Comunidad de Madrid together with the QNanolight (IFIMAC) group NanoQuCo starts now. We are hiring!
July 2021: Typical "bunching" of papers pre-holidays! First one from our internship student Jaime Redondo Yuste about the quantum optical properties of anisotropic Dirac points: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10743. Second one from David (JAE intro student) about how to modify collective dissipation using quantum metasurfaces: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00485. Final one from our PhD student Erik (from the i-COOP project) about the photon-mediated interactions that appear in Dirac Photonic Crystals: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00476.
June 2021: If you are interested in what kind of many-body phases appear in (topological) waveguide QED setups, please have a look at our new paper with M. Bello (now at MPQ) and G. Platero (ICMM-CSIC): https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11637
June 2021: We co-organize the 1st Workshop"Topology meet quantum optics" with an amazing list of invited speakers. If you are interested on these topics, do not miss it!
May 2021: First paper of our PhD student C. Vega is on the arXiv. If you are interested in what happens with qubit-photon bound states in topological waveguide with large winding numbers, have a look!
May 2021: We co-organize the 6th Workshop of Quantum Information from Spain: https://www.ice-6.hbar.es/, Very interesting set of contributed and invited speakers, do not miss it!
April 2021: The long paper about analog quantum chemistry simulation with Javier Argüello as the leading author is finally published: Phys. Rev. A 103, 043318 (2021)!. Great reference for beginners of this topic that we started in Nature 574 (7777), 215-218 (2019).
January 2021: Our collaboration with the group of O. Painter is published: Phys. Rev. X 11, 011015 (2021)!. Amazing to see how they could observe most of the predictions of our theory paper: Science Advances, eaaw0297 (2019).
November 2020: Our work extending some of the results of Quantum chemistry paper are finally on the arXiv: 2011.14113. Also our collaboration with my former group (MPQ) on how to generate photonic matrix states using Rydberg atomic arrays: arXiv: 2011.03919!
October 2020: Our paper with Iñaki García Elcano and Jorge Bravo Abad about the emergence of tunable bound states in photonic Weyl environments is finally published in Phys. Rev. Letters!
October 2020: Carlos Vega start his PhD thesis supervised by Diego Porras and myself to work on quantum many-body effects in topological photonics.

September 2020: Our work on "Frequency-resolved photon correlations in single cavity optomechanics" is out on the arXiv:2009.06216! Long-standing project of our collaboration with the groups J. Aizpurua and R. Esteban (CFM), G. Giedke (DIPC) and, of course, M. K. Schmidt (Macquiare University).

September 2020: Unai Zabaleta and David Fernández-Fernández join our group within the JAE Intro ICU and JAE intro programs from CSIC! They will be working one and five months in short projects supervised by me.