Marco Affronte

MARCO AFFRONTE is Associate Professor of Physics at University of Modena and team leader at the Institute of NanoScience S3 of CNR in Italy. After graduating in Physics (Laurea at University of Florence I, 1987), he obtained his Ph.D. at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (CH) in 1991 and worked at CNRS in Grenoble (F) in 1992–93. Since 1994 he is at University of Modena where he set up and run a laboratory for low temperature experiments.

His interests are now focused on NanoSciences, in particular nanomagnetism and spintronics and on development of nano-devices. He is currently leading scientist in promoting molecular spin clusters for quantum information processing and he obtained significant results on this topic, including evidence of entanglement of spin states in supramolecular systems.

His background is on solid state physics and his skills are in preparation of experiments under extreme conditions. In 2000 he discovered superconductivity in CaSi2 under high pressure and two years later he contributed to evidence two-band superconductivity in MgB2. In 1998 he started research activity on molecular magnets and he focused on the study of thermodynamics of these materials obtaining novel results by performing ultra-low temperature calorimetry and high field torque magnetometry. More recently, he contributed to develop protocols for deposition of molecules on surfaces and fabrication of hybrid nano- devices.

M. Affronte has been team leader of several national and European projects in the FP6. Since 2008 he coordinates the EU FP7-ICT project “MolSpinQIP” on quantum computation with molecular magnets.

M. Affronte is author of more than 130 scientific articles and he gave several presentations at international conferences and also to the general public. He also contributed to scientific articles in newspapers with interviews and helpled with the realization and diffusion of the photographic exhibition Blow-up: images from the NanoWorld.