UW Science Daily: You work on optics and Rydberg atoms. What does that actually mean in practice?
Prof. Michał Parniak: Optics makes it possible to observe even single atoms and study their properties. Together with my team, we work to uncover the laws that govern Rydberg atoms. These are atoms in a very highly excited state – meaning their outermost, or valence, electron is almost detached from the atom, but not quite.
UW Science Daily: What makes them so unusual?
Prof. Michał Parniak: Rydberg atoms exhibit what you could call exaggerated properties. In particular, their radius is no longer on the nanometer scale, but on the micrometer scale. At that point, you can essentially measure them with a micrometer screw gauge. At the same time, these atoms start interacting very strongly – not only with each other, but also with external signals, especially lasers, as well as radio waves, microwaves, millimeter waves, and terahertz radiation. That makes them especially useful, which is why in our lab we decided to turn this property into a practical application.
UW Science Daily: At what point did it become clear that this kind of fundamental atomic research could actually lead to real-world applications like a quantum sensor?
Prof. Michał Parniak: It is a slightly unconventional approach. Typically, you study fundamental properties for theory’s sake – and we did that too. But here we decided that this kind of fairly basic physics could actually have interesting applications, and that these applications hadn’t really been explored yet. So we started designing experiments to better understand how Rydberg atoms could work as so-called quantum sensors of external electromagnetic fields – radio, microwave, and so on. We also began building systems to make these sensors more compact and mobile, with the idea that one day they could become a real product.
As part of this work, we also took on applied projects, including ones for the European Space Agency. At the same time, we achieved some purely theoretical results – for example, showing that we can directly convert photons, the individual particles of electromagnetic radiation, from microwave to photons in the visible range. In practice, that means a microwave signal can be “translated” into visible light, which is much easier to detect and measure precisely using optical methods.
UW Science Daily: This is a slightly more scientific version of the chicken-and-egg question: did a fundamental discovery come first, and only then someone figured out its application, or was it the other way around?
Prof. Michał Parniak: In our case, there was a clear cause-and-effect chain running from basic research to application. Our paper on microwave–optical conversion – that is, the ability to convert microwave photons into optical ones – attracted the attention of the European Space Agency, which led to an implementation project that we are now completing.
This in turn generated new ideas, and a month ago we filed a patent application for a specific application of the method. We are hoping for a quantum sensor that could, for example, be useful in climate research.
So we started from a fundamental discovery – that we are able to do something at all – and only later moved toward more concrete applications, namely implementation and a patent.
UW Science Daily: What needs to happen for scientific results to go beyond just a publication – so they start echoing in new projects, international collaborations, PhD research, or even real-world applications?
Prof. Michał Parniak: For years, one of the institutions that has strongly supported us is the Foundation for Polish Science, where we carry out application- and implementation-oriented research. These include MAB projects and, more recently, MAB-FENG projects. In these programs, we are expected to focus almost entirely on applications. This constraint comes from the structure of European funding schemes. However, working exclusively on applications means that, in practice, they cannot be truly unique.
We have instead identified a branch of physics where we can essentially start from scratch. In this, we are supported both by the National Science Centre and by the “Excellence Initiative – Research University” program (IDUB).
An important part of scientific work is promoting research, for example at conferences. I myself have attended several excellent conferences, including as an invited speaker, thanks to IDUB. International contacts also sometimes allow us to see what the currently important problems are in a given field. The same applies to more local, not only international, collaborations.
Our students have also benefited from this program: they have travelled to conferences, often winning awards for their presentations, and had the chance to practice communicating their results. Encouragingly, most of them have stayed with us – they are now PhD students, some already halfway through their doctoral studies.
UW Science Daily: You mentioned the “Excellence Initiative – Research University” program. What has that support actually changed in how your research group works day to day, in practice?
Prof. Michał Parniak: It so happened that one of our grants had just ended and another had not yet started, and the IDUB program happened to fill that gap in between. You could say it “sustained excellence.” Normally, we would have had to simply wait, but instead we were able to continue working and develop new projects.
Another tangible benefit of such programs is the increased visibility of our research. This is very helpful for us and for our PhD students – both in terms of individual career development and in strengthening the university’s overall reputation.
Importantly, IDUB also supported us in publishing in open access, which can significantly increase the visibility and reach of our work.
UW Science Daily: In the natural sciences, people often talk about chance. Does it still have a role in physics today?
Prof. Michał Parniak: Chance in physics today often comes down to choosing a research topic in the first place – whether or not to pursue a given problem at all. Intuition, combined with a bit of luck, determines whether we stumble upon something truly remarkable or end up studying a phenomenon that, in the end, attracts little attention.
For every case where something genuinely interesting is discovered and then picked up by research groups around the world, there are probably five less spectacular results. That’s why, in science, it helps to explore multiple avenues in parallel, because you can never be entirely sure which one will turn out to be the most important.
UW Science Daily: Thank you for speaking with us.
“Research University: Five questions for…” is a series of interviews with researchers at the University of Warsaw who have carried out their projects within the framework of the Initiative of Excellence – Research University (IDUB) program.
The text was originally published in Polish on the Serwis Naukowy UW website on June 17, 2026.
