Today’s ecological crisis prompts us to rethink our attitude towards physical and natural realities that have traditionally been seen as opposed to human subjectivity and agency. What emerges from this “non-human turn” is a sense of our interdependence on things like the bacteria in our intestines or the carbon atoms supporting life on Earth. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton uses the metaphor of the “mesh” to express this idea of human/non-human interconnectedness. This project will map the formal and thematic strategies through which contemporary narrative practices engage with the non-human and envisage this interconnectedness. Storytelling is an indispensable tool for making sense of experience by establishing temporal and causal relations. But it is also biased towards the human-scale realities of action and social interaction. How can narrative overcome this bias? How does it convey phenomena that challenge our belief in the ontological and material self-sufficiency of the human? Comparing fictional narratives in print (novels and short stories) and conversational storytelling, we will systematically explore the ways in which narrative can forge connections across levels of reality, weaving together the human and the non-human into a single plot. The assumption is that narrative is a field where fictional practices are in constant dialogue with the stories told in everyday conversation—and with the culture-wide beliefs and concerns those stories reflect. Through its three sub-projects, the proposed research charts this complex dialogue while greatly advancing our understanding of how stories can be used to heighten people’s awareness of the mesh and its significance. The project builds on a combination of methods (close readings of novels, qualitative analysis of interviews), aiming to open up a new field of study at the intersection of literary scholarship and the social sciences—with narrative theory serving as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary exchange.

One of the major challenges in theoretical physics is the development of systematic methods for describing and simulating quantum many body systems with strong interactions. Given the huge experimental progress and technological potential in manipulating strongly correlated atoms and electrons, there is a pressing need for such a better theory. The study of quantum entanglement holds the promise of being a game changer for this question. By mapping out the entanglement structure of the low-energy wavefunctions of quantum spin systems on the lattice, the prototypical example of strongly correlated systems, we have found that the associated wavefunctions can be very well modeled by a novel class of variational wavefunctions, called tensor network states. Tensor networks are changing the ways in which strongly correlated systems can be simulated, classified and understood: as opposed to the usual many body methods, these tensor networks are generic and describe non-perturbative effects in a very natural way. The goal of this proposal is to advance the scope and use of tensor networks in several directions, both from the numerical and theoretical point of view. We plan to study the differential geometric character of the manifold of tensor network states and the associated nonlinear differential equations of motion on it, develop post tensor network methods in the form of effective theories on top of the tensor network vacuum, study tensor networks in the context of lattice gauge theories and topologically ordered systems, and investigate the novel insights that tensor networks are providing to the renormalization group and the holographic principle. Colloquially, we believe that tensor networks and the theory of entanglement provide a basic new vocabulary for describing strongly correlated quantum systems, and the main goal of this proposal is to develop the syntax and semantics of that new language.

In the ERC project ULPICC, a new type of optical amplifier was invented that is much more compact than existing optical amplifiers based on rare earth doping and much cheaper to fabricate than the ones based on III-V semiconductors. It is based on our discovery that HgTe colloidal quantum dots (QDs) exhibit a gain threshold several orders of magnitude lower than any other type of QDs studied before. Semiconductor QDs are fabricated using wet chemical synthesis procedures and can be deposited with cheap solution-based techniques such as printing which makes them competitive with traditional gain host media, with the additional advantage that the gain peak wavelength of colloidal QDs can be set freely by controlling the size of the QD, making them extremely versatile. An application (considered by big industrial players such as INTEL, IBM, NTT, …) particularly suffering from the lack of a compact optical amplifier is that of optical interconnects (OI) between chips to accommodate increasing data-transfer rates elusive for electronics. The OI market is expected to grow to $1 billion by 2021, where we expect the amplifier function can be valued anywhere up to 10% of the total OI value ! A heavily investigated approach to realize such an OI is that of ‘silicon photonics’, which has been shown to fulfil the requirements in terms of bandwidth and power consumption but lacks a native optical gain medium required to compensate the OI intrinsic losses. Therefore, the objective of INTERDOT is to assess the technical and commercial potential of optical amplifiers based on colloidal HgTe QDs, integrated on silicon photonics chips or in board-level OIs. We will validate their gain, specify their efficiency, initiate reliability and performance testing (through close industrial collaboration) and investigate how the knowhow involved can be protected and commercialized, either through licensing and/or spin-off creation.