Bilkent University Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department Faculty Member Prof. Tolga Mete Duman and Bilkent University Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Physics Department, Neuroscience Program and Bilkent UNAM Faculty Member Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ömer İlday have been selected for funding with a total budget of 4,910,000 EUR in ERC 2021 Advanced Grant Call under the Horizon Europe Programme.
Prof. Duman will be using the five-year funding for his research project named “TRANCIDS: Transmission over Channels with Insertions and Deletions.” The project will take on the grand challenge of addressing the effects of insertions and deletions caused by synchronization errors over various communication channels by developing theoretical limits of transmission and by designing practical channel coding solutions approaching these limits. The project builds upon Dr. Duman’s extensive experience in physical layer communications, information theory, and channel coding/modulation, specifically, his previous work on basic insertion and deletion channels. The findings of the project will highly impact different emerging applications such as DNA storage and beyond 5G wireless communications.
Dr. Ilday’s ERC project, titled “UNILASE: Second modelocking for a universal material-processing laser,” aims to create a laser unlike others to date and to generate a crystal of light – a perfectly periodic array of ultrafast pulses that are self-assembled and held together by their mutual interactions. These crystals of light will exploit the ablation-cooled regime, also invented by Dr. Ilday, for ultra-efficient cutting of any material and may, one day, enable painless laser surgery and dentistry. This new laser concept was born out of an analogy between laser physics and self-organization, which Dr. Ilday developed in his previous ERC Projects, NLL and SUPERSONIC. Moreover, the physics of the proposed laser is analogous, in name and concept, to second quantization that underlies modern theoretical physics. By exploring the new conceptual connections, Dr. Ilday aims to advance our fundamental understanding of complex systems with implications that may reach well beyond laser physics.