Ioannis Georgakilas, from Greece, obtained his BSc degree on Physics from the University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece, in 2019. Then he obtained a MSc degree on “Quantum Devices” from the Department of Physics of the University of Paris; a graduate program co-organized with Ecole Polytechnique.

Ioannis conducted his MSc Thesis within the frame of an internship in the “Polariton quantum fluids” group at the Centre of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (C2N) of CNRS, Palaiseau, France. The title of his Thesis was “Engineering negative coupling in polaritonic lattices: toward emulating the Aharonov-Bohm Hamiltonian” and was supervised by Prof. Jacqueline Bloch and Prof. Philippe St-Jean.

After his MSc degree, Ioannis pursued two internships. He spent 6 months in the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) of the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Greece, working in the “Ultrafast Spectroscopy” group of Prof. Nikos Pelekanos on optical characterization of Perovskite single crystals. Then he spent 4 months in the “Nonlinear Optical Devices” group of Prof. Giuseppe Leo at the MPQ lab of the University of Paris in France working on electron beam lithography of AlGaAs nanostructures for realising nonlinear metasurfaces.

Currently, Ioannis Georgakilas is working on the AppQInfo project “Strongly interacting polaritons in a lattice” towards the realisation of an exciton-polariton quantum simulator, as a member of the research group “Quantum Photonics” at IBM Research Europe – Zurich, supervised by Dr. Rainer F. Mahrt.         

His research interests are the study of quantum phenomena in photonics and condensed matter and their implementation in novel technological applications. Here, his focus is on strong light-matter interaction inside optical microcavities, and the formation of the hybrid light-matter quasiparticles called cavity exciton-polaritons. He is fascinated about the prospect of exploiting polariton’s dual nature for the realisation of future quantum technologies.

In his free time, Ioannis enjoys communicating with friends and family, joining social events and participating in sport activities.