Past Events

Strong light-matter interactions hold great promise for modulating molecular and material properties, including chemical reactivity, energy transfer, and charge conductivity, via polaritonic states. In realistic chemical and material systems, disorder arising from thermal fluctuations and structural defects is inevitable and has a significant impact on the polaritonic state. However, disorder is often considered a perturbative effect and is usually omitted from models of light-matter dynamics and spectroscopy.

Satellite measurements of Earth’s radiation budget (ERB) have uncovered profound mysteries within the Earth system, including a doubling of Earth’s energy imbalance over the last two decades and a sustained hemispheric albedo symmetry. In this seminar, I will demonstrate that a targeted exploration of the spatial, diurnal, and spectral dimensions of ERB is essential to advance the field from the current state of broadband monitoring toward a robust, process-oriented understanding.

Join alumni and faculty from the Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences and Physics departments as they share their experiences and advice on applying for jobs, careers in quantum, and careers in heliophysics!

For the last quarter century, experiments at Brookha

Digital quantum simulations and quantum error-correction protocols require the application of local gates. We demonstrate such local control in a Sr-88 tweezer array platform by locally shifting the qubit frequency using off-resonant light. This enables precise, highly parallel local Z rotations with low crosstalk. In combination with fast, recoil-free global X rotations, optimized via optimal-control techniques to minimize motional entanglement, this approach allows the local implementation of universal single-qubit gates at rates exceeding 20 kHz.

In this seminar, I present recent results on the structure, variability and energetics of the far upper atmosphere found by the method of solar occultation, where atmospheric properties are inferred using sunlight as it passes through an atmosphere. The extreme ultraviolet (EUV) band is strongly absorbed in the thermosphere, enabling EUV occultations to provide a unique window into a sparsely observed region of the atmosphere.

Strain is powerful for discovery and manipulation of new phases of matter; however, elastic strains accessible to epitaxial films and bulk crystals are typically limited to small, uniform, and discrete values. In this talk I will describe our progress on synthesizing single crystalline membranes of Heusler compounds, which enable large continuously tunable strains and strain gradients via bending and rippling. This synthesis strategy borrows ideas from remote epitaxy and van der Waals epitaxy on graphene, and I will describe our current understanding of the growth mechanisms.

Active systems are driven out of equilibrium by exch

The JILA Postdoc Group invites all postdocs to a panel discussion with JILA fellows Xun Gao, Taeho Ryu, and Bryan Changala. During the panel, the fellows will discuss their recent experiences in the academic job market. This is a prime opportunity for postdocs who are starting to think about the academic job market, or who are ready to apply, to ask the panelists questions about the details of the process. Lunch will be provided after the panel.

Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community (PISEC) is the longstanding JILA-PFC community partnership-based public engagement program. PISEC connects university volunteers with K12 youth to engage in hands-on, inquiry-based science activities and projects through afterschool clubs and in-class project-based mentorship. We seek to support youth STEM identity development and to cultivate and sustain students' interest in STEM by co-creating transformative and empowering experiences with STEM.

Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in a warming climate, reversing decades of air quality improvements, as seen in the 2025 Los Angeles Fires and many other record-breaking events worldwide. Crucially, what burns locally doesn’t stay local—wildfire smoke often rises, travels, and affects the atmosphere and climate far beyond its source. I will share new insights into the far-reaching impacts of wildfire smoke based on aircraft measurements, satellite observations, and modeling.

In this talk, I will discuss two recent developments centered on the physics and manipulation of hyperfine interactions in atomic and molecular systems. First, I will introduce an all-optical method for performing qudit gate operations in alkaline-earth and alkaline-earth-like atoms. Our scheme utilizes single-beam Raman transitions within the 1S0 to 3P1 manifold to achieve coherent manipulation of high-dimensional hyperfine levels, compatible with non-destructive readout and two-qudit gates via Rydberg blockade.

Quantum transducers provide a pathway to link superconducting circuits to quantum networks that extend over large distances at ambient temperatures. Here, we present our progress toward entangling a superconducting qubit in a dilution refrigerator with a time-bin encoded optical qubit propagating through a room temperature telecom fiber. Starting from a transmon qubit coupled to a microwave resonator, we generate an itinerant time-bin encoded microwave qubit entangled with the transmon.

The interplay between spin and charge in chiral materials — ranging from simple organic molecules to complex hybrid semiconductors — has emerged as one of the more intriguing open scientific problems. Chirality is fundamentally a symmetry question — an object is chiral if it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image — and chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS), whereby chiral materials preferentially transmit electrons of a particular spin orientation, is a striking consequence of this broken symmetry.

Competition among multiple orders is a defining feature of strongly correlated matter, from frustrated magnets to high-T_c superconductors. Here, I will present two examples where quantum dynamics is governed by such multiparty competition.

Continuous-variable quantum systems enable encoding complex states in fewer modes through large-scale non-Gaussian states. Motion, as a continuous degree of freedom, underlies phenomena from Cooper pair dynamics to levitated macroscopic objects. Hence, realizing high-energy, spatially extended motional states remains key for advancing quantum sensing, simulation, and foundational tests.
In the talk, I will present the following control tasks for various nonlinear mechanical systems, including trapped atoms, levitated particles, and clamped oscillators with spin-motion coupling.

Emergent quantum phases often arise when interactions extend beyond nearest neighbors, giving rise to frustration, topology, and competing orders. Dipolar quantum gases offer a uniquely tunable and microscopically controlled platform for engineering and probing such long-range quantum matter. In this talk, I present two complementary experimental platforms that advance this frontier.

Building new tools capable of studying phenomena beyond the reach of current technologies opens exciting opportunities. Quantum sensors harness the small and fragile nature of the qubits to achieve extremely precise measurements, enabling breakthroughs in fundamental physics and real-world applications by pushing resolution and sensitivity to new limits.

Neutral-atom arrays have emerged as a leading platform for scalable quantum computing, combining excellent coherence, optical control of large qubit ensembles, and flexible all-to-all connectivity. Achieving fault tolerance, however, requires efficient error detection and correction. Ytterbium offers unique advantages through its metastable-state qubits: leakage to the ground state can be independently detected, converting physical errors into erasures with known locations, while single-photon excitation to Rydberg states enables scalable, high-fidelity two qubit gates.

Many anticipated discoveries in fundamental science demand better measurement sensitivity. For acoustic sensors, mechanical dissipation sets this limit via the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Yet, even in high-purity crystals, its microscopic origin remains poorly understood, and external enhancement, such as tension-induced dissipation dilution, is difficult to realize. Here, we realize a strain-engineered diamond nanomechanical platform using van der Waals self-assembly that harnesses surface forces to apply tensile stress exceeding 1 GPa.