Alex Hayat, an electrical engineer, is a Horev Fellow and assistant professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. His research is aimed at developing devices based on novel states of matter, for quantum technologies, low-power ultrafast nanoelectronics, solar energy and bio-medical imaging.

Alex is interested in combining novel states of matter – such as superconductivity, quantum condensates and topological insulators – with quantum optics and new concepts in quantum measurement to study light-matter interaction and develop new quantum devices. These devices can contribute to a wide range of applications in quantum information processing, including quantum computation, communications and metrology. Practical realizations of quantum information processing must allow scaling. Creating interfaces between different physical platforms is a crucial element for future integration.

Combining recent advances in quantum optics and in condensed-matter physics should result in a rich spectrum of novel fundamental phenomena as well as enabling new quantum information devices and technologies

Alex received his PhD in 2011 from the Technion. His dissertation, “Applications of Multi-Photon Processes for Semiconductor Quantum Photonics,” was written under the supervision of Prof. Meir Orenstein. Alex was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow and a CIFAR Global Scholar in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto.

Alex has received numerous awards and honors, including the Israel Council for Higher Education Alon Scholarship (2014), the Government of Ontario John C. Polanyi Prize in Physics (2012), the European Physical Society PhD Thesis Prize (2011), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Howard Alper Prize (2011). His work has been published in a variety of scientific journals, including Physical Review , Optics Express and Physical Review Letters.