Francisco José Pena Benitez, PhD will receive almost 200,000 EUR for conducting research and assembling a research team to work at WUST’s W11. The funding comes from the POLS competition organised by the National Centre for Science.

POLS is a competition supporting mobility, carried out under the formula of small grants for scientists from all over the world willing to do research in Poland. The amount of the grant (from 100,000 to 200,000 EUR) may be used for the research team’s salaries, depreciation or purchase of apparatus, or covering the costs of materials and services, costs of trips and conferences, or other costs connected with projects. A project under the initiative can last 12 or 24 months.

Francisco José Pena Benitez, PhD is originally from Caracas, where he obtained a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the Central University of Venezuela. Later on, he earned a PhD in theoretical physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2013. He has worked at institutions including the University of Crete in Greece, the INFN in Italy, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. His research focuses on transport in strongly and weakly coupled systems.

At WUST, he will work on the project named "Field theory, gravity, and topology in condensed matter systems". The project will be carried out over the next two years. The researcher plans to move to Wrocław in September and will begin his work then.

- I decided to move to Poland because there are favourable research funding programmes here for younger scientists attempting to assemble small research groups. The POLS competition is just one example - says Francisco José Pena Benitez, PhD. - It allows me to hire a researcher with a PhD degree so I can start my own small team. What’s more, given my intersecting research interests, I will join forces with the group of my long-time collaborator Piotr Surówka, PhD – he adds.

Doctor Surówka is also a new member of staff at the Department of Theoretical Physics, headed by Professor Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron. Previously, like the Venezuelan scientist, he had worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and, like him, came to WUST with his own grant to build a research group.

Entitled "Critical phases of matter without energy barrier, from topology to geometry", his project will be carried out under the Sonata BIS competition organised by the National Centre for Science.

The goal of Dr Francisco José Pena Benitez's project is to describe the hydrodynamic properties of electrons inside certain recently discovered materials, called topological semi-metals. A characteristic feature of the electron flow inside these materials is that exotic quantum effects allow electrons to be transported inside a wire made of this material without energy loss.

Understanding these properties will provide the basis for building more efficient energy storage devices and could also prove useful for designing quantum computers. The origin of these exotic properties is based on certain similarities between mathematical models describing the physical properties of electrons inside a material and models describing the action caused of high-energy particles, such as those produced at particle colliders such as the Geneva LHC.