Prineha Narang, UCLA professor of physical sciences and of electrical and computer engineering, has been awarded a nearly $2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for a four-year project to create new probes using entanglement and quantum photonic states.

Breakthroughs in science frequently combine new theoretical insights with advances in instrumentation and probes to test these predictions. Inspired by the work in her lab to study long-range entanglement -- connecting more than one particle on the quantum level so that they interact simultaneously regardless of the distance between them -- Narang will use these mathematical concepts in realizable optics experiments to probe various types of matter on a scale that has never been done before.

Narang, a quantum scientist and engineer, received a previous grant from the Moore Foundation when she was named a 2018 Moore Inventor Fellow. This new grant affirms her desire to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge forward for the sake of fundamental exploration and discovery science.

"The Moore Foundation is unique in supporting work that is too early for anyone else to fund, and at a level that is meaningful to open fields and lines of inquiry," said Narang, an American Physical Society Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow and U.S. Science Envoy. "Their support gives us the ability to build a new platform that we can use to probe all the way from the tiniest scale of quantum matter to the limits of what we know about physics -- this is a bold way to interrogate nature through an entirely new lens."