Prof. Dr. Tomasz Smolenski
Professor
Professor
Departement Physik
Klingelbergstrasse 82
4056
Basel
Schweiz
Administrative assistant
Prof. Dr. Tomasz Smolenski
Short Biography
Tomasz Smoleński received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 2010 and 2012, respectively. In 2018, he received a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from the same university with summa cum laude. During this period, he collaborated closely with LNCMI-CNRS, a high-magnetic field institute in Grenoble, France. He also received numerous awards, including the Polish Prime Minister Prize—the most prestigious award for a PhD thesis in Poland. In 2018, he was awarded a fellowship from the Polish National Science Centre to join the research group of Atac Imamoglu at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Switzerland, where he later worked as a postdoctoral researcher until 2025. In 2025, he was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Basel.
Research Summary
Our group utilizes low-temperature magneto-optical and quantum-optical spectroscopy to investigate collective electronic, excitonic, and spin phenomena in tunable atomically-thin quantum materials. In our lab, we design and assemble new classes of highly-controllable van der Waals heterostructures and probe them with various opto-electronic techniques, including linear or non-linear spectroscopy, ultra-fast time-resolved experiments, super-resolution imaging etc. This allows us to access novel strongly correlated phases of matter such as electronic crystals, topological liquids or unconventional magnets, as well as to explore their quantum phase diagrams with a variety of tuning knobs, such as bias voltage, magnetic field, strain, externally-tunable spatial confinement etc. This research enables us not only to answer outstanding fundamental questions of condensed matter physics, but also to open new vistas for quantum technologies and quantum computing.