CAS researchers will lead prestigious centres

Five of the ten new Norwegian Centres of Excellence (SFF) are assigned the University of Oslo.

CAS is proud to announce that one of our next year’s group leaders Trygve Helgaker and one of our board alternates Kenneth Ruud will lead the SFF titled Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences.

Read about Helgaker's CAS project Molecules in extreme Environments

Former CAS group leader Arne Brataas is also leading a SFF: the Center for Low Dissipation Quantum Spintronics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Additionally, two former CAS researchers, Eirik Grude Flekkøy and Knut Jørgen Måløy, will take part in the centre titled Porous Media Laboratory also at NTNU.  

SFF: a time-limited research centre

A SFF is, unlike CAS, a research centre affiliated with a research institution in Norway. The goal of the concept is to establish time-limited research centres (ten years) 'characterised by focused, long-term research efforts of a high international calibre, and where researcher training is an important aspect'.

CAS is on the otherhand an independent foundation with no end-date.

The national program is funded by The Research Council of Norway, which describes the scheme as follows:

“The SFF program gives Norway’s best scientists the opportunity to organize their research in centres in order to reach ambitious scientific goals. The research should be innovative and have major potential to generate ground-breaking results that advance the international research frontier.”

New methods of measuring millions of atoms

Trygve Helgaker and Kenneth Ruud will lead one of the ten new Norwegian Centres of Excellence (SFF). The title is named after the Norwegian physicist Egil A. Hylleraas (1898-1965). One of their goals is to understand and control biological and chemical systems in extreme environments: only now it is technically possible to create advanced experiments for examination of similar real systems in other places in the world.  

Energy efficient society

The goal of the centre Arne Brataas will lead is to ‘start a revolution in low energy communication technology for an energy efficient society’. The SFF will ‘make the foundation for tomorrow’s technology in solving the energy challenges in electronic signals’.