Lab Members
The Rey Group
Principal Investigator
Ana Maria Rey
arey@jila.colorado.edu | 303-492-8089 | Rey CV
My research interests are in the scientific interface between atomic, molecular and optical physics, condensed matter physics and quantum information science. Specifically, on ways of developing new techniques for controlling quantum systems and then using them in various applications ranging from quantum simulations/information to time and frequency standards. My group wants to engineer fully controllable quantum systems capable to mimic desired real materials as well as to develop advanced and novel measurement techniques capable of probing atomic quantum systems at the fundamental level.
Education
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland, USA
Ph.D., Physics
August 2004
Dissertation Title: "Ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices"
Advisors: Charles W. Clark and Theodore R. Kirkpatrick
Universidad de los Andes
Bogota, Colombia
B.S., Physics
March 1999
Dissertation Title: "Propagation of electromagnetic radiation in Kerr's metric"
Advisors: Rafael Bautista
Academic Experience
Fellow of JILA
January 2012–Present
Associate Fellow of JILA
August 2008–January 2012
Adjoint Professor, Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder
September 2017–Present
Associate Research Professor
January 2013–August 2017
Assistant Research Professor
August 2008–January 2013
Institute of Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP)
At the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Postdoctoral fellow
September, 2005 - 2008
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
Postdoctoral researcher
September 2004 - September 2005
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland, USA.
Research Assistant
September 2000 - September 2004
Research Associate
Dr. Thomas Bilitewski
Thomas.Bilitewski@colorado.edu | 303-492-3906 | Bilitewski CV
I obtained my MSc in 2013 at the University of Munich and my PhD in 2016 at the University of Cambridge.
My PhD Research focussed on the interplay of periodic driving (Floquet systems), e.g. to induce synthetic gauge fields, and many-body interactions, in cold atomic systems. It aimed to understand deleterious heating effects observed in experiment, and to design experimental protocols to avoid these opening up the possibility to access strongly interacting periodically driven many-body phases.
During my Post-Doc in Dresden I explored the interplay of disorder and spin-liquidity, and the interplay of spin-liquidity and classical chaos in terms of OTOC's motivated by recent developments in the field of quantum chaos.
Dr. Miskeen Khan
Muhammad.Khan@jila.colorado.edu | 303-492-7141
I obtained my M.Phil (Electronics) at Quaid-i-Azam university, Pakistan. I further obtained my PhD (Physics) degree under the supervisions of Prof. José Tito Mendonça and Dr. Hugo Tercas in 2021 at Instituto Superior Técnico, university of Lisbon, Portugal. I also worked as a visiting PhD student in the group of Prof. Maciej Lewenstein at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain.
During my PhD, I worked on theoretical modelling of various hybrid quantum devices that are mainly composed of the mechanical degrees of freedom. As such, I addressed the open system dynamics and the control of phonons while these are coupled to other quantum systems such as, light, atomic spin systems, and quasi-particle excitations.
Since October 2021, I joined Rey's group as a postdoctoral fellow. I am interested in the development of novel quantum devices that contribute in the developments of quantum technologies.
Dr. Asier Piñeiro Orioli
Asier.Pineiro@jila.colorado.edu | 303-492-4970
I did my MSc and PhD at the University of Heidelberg, and I joined Rey's group as a Postdoc in the beginning of 2018. I am broadly interested in the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of many-body quantum systems, both from a fundamental point of view as well as for applications in quantum technologies. During my PhD I studied the emergence of universal dynamics in ultracold quantum gases and the quench dynamics of Rydberg gases in collaboration with an experimental group at Heidelberg. Apart from this, I developed new theoretical tools to tackle non-equilibrium problems using phase-space and field-theory methods.
My current research focuses on understanding the dynamics of multilevel systems relevant to experiments of alkaline-earth atom in optical lattices and cavities, especially for applications in quantum information and quantum metrology. I am particularly interested in cooperative phenomena in light-matter interacting systems (e.g. subradiance) as well as the thermalization dynamics of dipolar-interacting systems and systems with SU(N) symmetry.
Dr. Bhuvanesh Sundar
I completed my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Erich Mueller at Cornell University in 2017. In my PhD, I developed ideas for quantum simulation of many-body physics —including Majorana fermions, Kondo physics, and quantum dimer models—using ultracold gases. I also modeled the emergence of supersolids in cold atoms trapped in a cavity.
In my postdoctoral research with Dr. Kaden Hazzard at Rice University, I developed protocols for simulating synthetic dimensions in ultracold molecules, developed and analysed the performance of numerical techniques such as NLCE, TWA and DTWA in capturing many-body dynamics, modeled experiments that searched for the FFLO phase in neutral ultracold atoms, used complex network analyses to characterize quantum many-body systems, and developed a quantum algorithm to count Hamiltonians' ground states.
In my postdoctoral research with Prof. Peter Zoller at Innsbruck, I developed a protocol to probe entanglement in subsystems of many-body quantum ground states, and developed a quantum protocol to probe quantum information scrambling in many-body systems.
Dr. Tianrui Xu
tianrui.xu@colorado.edu | 303-492-7141
I received my B.Sc. in physics and mathematics at the University of British Columbia in 2016 and my M.A. and Ph.D. in physics at University of California at Berkeley in 2021, under the supervision of Prof. Joel E. Moore. I joined Prof. Rey’s group in fall, 2021.
My main research interest lies in quantum dynamics of correlated fermions. Before coming to JILA, I focused my research mainly on superconducting systems under mean-field approximation, both in- and out-of-equilibrium, as can be probed in ultrafast experiments. I have also explored some phenomena that are not specifically related to fermions, such as Anderson localization with long-range interactions and quantum chaos. My current research focuses on multilevel, many-body systems with SU(N) symmetry, as can be realized with fermionic alkaline-earth atoms in optical lattices and cavities. I am excited to explore the phases and dynamics emerging from such systems and their connections to solids.
Dr. Jeremy Young
jeremy.young@colorado.edu
I received my B.S. in physics and in mathematics from the University of Rochester in 2013 and my Ph.D. in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2019. I joined Professor Rey's group as an NRC postdoc in 2020.
My research has focused on understanding non-equilibrium dynamics in open quantum systems and using Rydberg atoms for quantum computation and simulation. Some highlights of this research include the identification of new forms of non-equilibrium critical behavior at driven-dissipative phase transitions and the development of a new approach to engineering multi-qubit Rydberg gates by using strong microwave dressing.
Graduate Student
Sanaa Agarwal
Sanaa.Agarwal@colorado.edu
I graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) in Rajasthan, India with a double-major in Physics and Mechanical Engineering in 2019. I joined CU Boulder as a graduate student in 2019 and joined Prof. Rey's group in the summer of 2020. I am currently working towards understanding the effects of dipole-dipole interactions in multi-level atoms and drawing comparisons with the widely-studied case of two-level atoms in optical lattices. The understanding of light-matter interactions in these systems is pertinent to experiments involving alkaline-earth atoms with hyperfine levels and a degenerate ground-state manifold.
Diego Barberena
Diego.Barberena@colorado.edu
I received my B.Sc. in physics at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in 2013 and received a M.Sc. degree in quantum optics at the same place in 2016. I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017 and joined Professor’s Rey group at the end of the same year.
My interests encompass quantum technologies and their implementations in AMO and condensed matter systems, as well as the more theoretical aspects of these subjects. I am generally excited both by the possibilities offered by systems of cold atoms to simulate various complex phenomena and by the theoretical understanding of these phenomena themselves. I am currently studying collective coherent interactions of many atoms with a cavity.
Anjun Chu
Anjun.Chu@Colorado.edu
I obtained my B.Sc. in physics at Tsinghua University in 2018, and subsequently became a Ph.D. student in the Rey Theory Group at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests are mainly in the realization and characterization of exotic quantum many-body phenomena in highly controllable ultracold atomic systems. I'm currently focusing on the non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum spin model based on trapped bosonic gas platform and photon-mediated interactions of alkaline earth atoms in optical cavity.
Mikhail Mamaev
Mikhail.Mamaev@colorado.edu
I received my B.Sc. in mathematics & physics from McGill University in 2015. I stayed for two more years to complete an M.Sc. in physics. I moved to CU Boulder for a Ph.D. program in the fall of 2017, and work on theoretical AMO physics for Prof. Rey's group.
My interests include strongly interacting many-body systems, dissipative dynamics and entanglement generation. My current project combines several of these aspects by working on exchange dynamics of strontium in a 3D optical lattice. I investigate the effects of strong repulsive interactions in tandem with spin-orbit coupling and single-particle physics to realize useful, highly entangled states.
Sean Muleady
Sean.Muleady@Colorado.EDU
I completed my A.B. in physics at Princeton University in 2017, and subsequently enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado, Boulder and joined Professor Rey’s theory group.
I am interested in using AMO platforms to realize complex many-body phenomena and exotic phases of matter and to understand the growth of quantum entanglement in these systems. My current work focuses on the application and development of techniques based on phase space methods and matrix product states in order to study many-body localization and quantum thermalization in optical lattice systems with dipolar interactions.
Michael Perlin
Michael.Perlin@colorado.edu | Website
I received my B.Sc. in physics at Oregon State University in 2015, spent a year in the Controlled Quantum Dynamics Group at Ulm University, and am currently a Ph.D. student in the Rey Theory Group at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
My research interests are primarily in quantum simulation, quantum computation, and quantum information theory in the context of AMO and condensed matter systems. I am particularly excited by the use of highly controllable cold atomic systems as a versatile playground for studying exotic quantum phenomena and developing novel quantum technologies. I currently study spin-orbit coupling and effective three-body physics of cold atoms in optical lattices.
