Six DESY scientists awarded prestigious ERC Synergy Grants

Two DESY teams secure nearly €20 million in funding for two groundbreaking research programmes in fundamental physics.

The IDEAA team: (from left) Saša Bajt, Nina Rohringer, Francesca Calegari, and Henry Chapman Photo: Francesca Calegari

The NP-QED tea,: (from left) Andreas Maier and Jenny List from DESY, Henri Vincenti from CEA, and Antonino Di Piazza from the University of Rochester Photo: Andreas Maier

Both funded projects strive for significant scientific milestones. The team comprising Saša Bajt, Francesca Calegari, Henry Chapman, and Nina Rohringer is awarded 14 million euro for DESY and will combine atomic-scale imaging with the Nobel Prize-winning field of attosecond science, the most advanced ultrafast imaging of matter in science. The other team is a collaboration between DESY scientist Jenny List and lead scientist Andreas Maier, alongside Henri Vincenti from the French research organisation CEA and Antonino Di Piazza from the University of Rochester in the USA. This programme, also funded with 14 million euro of which 5.3 million will go to DESY, will investigate the quantum fundamentals of the electromagnetic force, one of the universe’s four basic forces, by generating extremely high electric fields using plasma accelerators and high-powered lasers.

The European Research Council (ERC) is the premier research funding body for frontier research in the EU. The ERC Synergy Grants are particularly prestigious as they require exceptional interdisciplinary collaboration. With only 66 projects funded out of 701 applications in 2025 (a success rate of just 9.4%), these awards position the recipients among Europe's top researchers. The grants not only provide substantial funding but also carry significant prestige, enhancing the international reputation of both the individual researchers and DESY as a leading research institution.

“Research at DESY is not only excellent but diverse, as these two ERC Synergy Grants make clear,” says DESY Chair of the Board of Directors Beate Heinemann. “Our scientists have brought together themes, methods, and theories present in different parts of our research centre and proposed novel collaborative plans to develop new technologies for the understanding of matter. I was particularly amazed that one of the grants was awarded to four DESY scientists who formed a team. My warmest congratulations to all researchers involved in both grants, and most of all I wish them all the best in achieving their research goals.”

The winning research teams will use the funding over the next 72 months to make new doctoral and postdoctoral positions and develop new instrumentation. For the researchers who proposed the two projects, their goal is to develop tools that others in their fields can use to approach new research questions and make definitive advancements in answering long-lingering questions about the nature of matter. Additionally, both teams aim to provide benchmarks for longstanding theories using direct evidence from the new methods they will develop.

More information can be found here.