Bernard van Heck

Tenure-Track Researcher (RTD-B)
Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma.
Contact: bernard.vanheck (at) uniroma1 (dot) it

Teaching

A.A. 2024-25: Meccanica Quantistica e Meccanica Statistica
A.A. 2023-24: Meccanica Quantistica e Meccanica Statistica
A.A. 2022-23: Fisica II per Scienze Chimiche

About me

I am a physicist working in condensed matter theory (and, sometimes, in experiment too).

I studied physics at Sapienza in Rome, where I was born in 1986. I obtained my PhD in 2015 with Carlo Beenakker in Leiden, after which I went to Yale for a postdoc with Leonid Glazman. Then I worked for four years as a researcher for Microsoft Quantum, first at Station Q in Santa Barbara and then in Copenhagen and Delft. In 2021 I went back to academia, spending one year working in the experimental group of Tjerk Oosterkamp in Leiden before coming back to Rome.

So far, my research mostly revolved around mesoscopic physics and topological phases of matter. I have worked a lot on Majorana zero modes and quantum superconducting circuits, especially those involving Josephson junctions made with semiconducting nanowires. I like to study and design solid-state devices for quantum computing. I find appealing the difficult idea to realize quantum states which are protected from decoherence. I am also interested in macroscopic quantum phenomena and the history and foundations of quantum mechanics.

For technical details you can check my curriculum vitae.

Publications

All my publications in reverse chronological order are available at this arXiv page.
For citation metrics, you can check my Google Scholar.