News

Adam Kaufman, a JILA Fellow, NIST Physicist, and CU Boulder Physics Professor, has been awarded part of a $1.25 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of its third annual cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators.

Dr. Matthew Norcia, a member of JILA’s extensive alumni network, has been awarded the prestigious 2024 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Early Career Scientist Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. The IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize honors early career physicists for their exceptional contributions within specific subfields, offering recognition through a certificate, medal, and monetary award.

JILA Fellow, NIST Physicist, and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Adam Kaufman has been honored with a prestigious 2024 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

Aaron Young, a recently graduated Ph.D. student in the lab of JILA Fellow, NIST Physicist, and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Adam Kaufman, has been awarded the prestigious 2024 Deborah Jin Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics by the American Physical Society (APS) for his work done at JILA. The award was announced in Fort Worth, Texas, at the 2024 55th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP).

We recently demonstrated a new architecture for programmable control of Hubbard systems of neutral atoms. Here we used this platform to prepare and control systems of up to 180 particles. We study how their dynamics realize the boson sampling problem, originally formulated for photonics. You can read more about here. Congratulations to the team!!

We have demonstrated a family of multi-qubit gates to create GHZ states on the optical clock transition in strontium. We use these to show atom-laser clock comparisons below the standard quantum limit. We also create cascade GHZ states for large dynamic range phase estimation. Congratulations to the team!!

Our paper demonstrating the omg-architecture and mid-circuit operations in Ytterbium-171 has been published in PRX. Congratulations to the team!

After ~six very productive years, Aaron defended and graduated (on Nov. 1, 2023)! Congratulations Dr. Young! We are sad to see you go but very excited for your next adventure in the Greiner group!

The Heising-Simons Foundation's Science program has announced a generous grant of $3 million over three years, aimed at bolstering theoretical and experimental research efforts to bridge the realms of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics with quantum gravity theories. Among the recipients, a notable grant was awarded to a multi-investigator collaboration spearheaded by the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and JILA, a joint institute of CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

JILA and NIST Fellow Ana Maria Rey and JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman have both been recently featured in an article for IEEE Spectrum. In a pair of Nature papers, Rey and Kaufman both demonstrated the phenomena of spin-squeezing to reduce noise in their quantum systems. "All objects that follow the rules of quantum physics can exist in multiple energy states at once, an effect known as superposition," explains the IEEE Spectrum article. "Spin squeezing reduces all those possible superposition states to just a few possibilities in some respects, while expanding them in others." 

Our paper reporting squeezing below the standard quantum limit in a programmable atom array has been published in nature! Congratulations to the team! Exciting to co-publish with the Browaeys/Yao and Roos/Rey teams too!

JILA Fellow, NIST Physicist, and University of Colorado Physics professor Adam Kaufman has been awarded a grant as part of the 2023 Young Investigator Research Program, or YIP. YIP was launched by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, the basic research arm of the Air Force Research Laboratory. The AFOSR's mission is to support Air Force goals of control and maximum utilization of air, space, and cyberspace. To do this, AFSOR is awarding $25 million in grants to 58 scientists and engineers from 44 research institutions and businesses in 22 states in 2023. 

JILA graduate student Aaron Young, a researcher in JILA Fellow and NIST Physicist Adam Kaufman’s laboratory has been awarded a 2022 University of Chicago Quantum Creators Prize. The prize is part of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, one of the largest organizations celebrating quantum research and computing in the U.S. As Young explained: “This award is relatively new, this is only the second year it's been around, but I think it does a good job of providing some visibility to junior people in the field - particularly to people outside the academic community like those in industry or in government.” To promote early career research and diversity within the field of quantum science, award winners receive an honorarium of $500, a prize certificate, and reimbursed travel to the 2022 Chicago Quantum Summit. 

Adam Kaufman — a JILA Fellow, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Physicist, and University of Colorado Boulder Professor — has been awarded the American Physical Society's (APS) 2023 I.I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics. 

Boulder, Colo. — Physicist Adam Kaufman of both JILA and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been awarded the 2023 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for his work in advancing the control of atoms and molecules to improve atomic clocks and quantum information processing. 

Our recent manuscripts on tweezer programmable quantum walks and optical clock Bell states were published in Science and Nature Physics. You can read more about these experiments here. 

Both of these experiments relied on some new technology we developed for interfacing optical tweezer arrays and optical lattices. This approach was recently highlight here, in a piece by Giulia Semeghini. 

Our first paper from the Ytterbium tweezer project has been published in PRX! We show rapid control of the nuclear-spin qubit, T₁ on 10 to 100 second timescales, and T₂ times of several seconds. We also harness the narrow transitions in Yb to perform near-deterministic loading and ground-state cooling. See also follow up synopsis in Physics here.

In January, we posted our first demonstration of a new concept for tweezer-programmable optical lattices. Using tweezers with spatial scale on the order of 400 nm, we can program the dynamics and Hamiltonian with single lattice site resolution. We use resolved-sideband cooling to prepare the atoms at extremely low temperatures. From these conditions, we demonstrate for the first time the implementation of a spatial search algorithm originally proposed by Childs and Goldstone. Andrew Childs collaborated with us on this project, and we expect interesting extensions down the line to multi-particle search algorithms.   

In the past month, the group has put up two new preprints. 

- In the strontium experiment, we report the generation of entangled Bell states, prepared in optical clock qubits, whose phase coherence persists for more than 4 seconds. This uses a gate scheme proposed by M. Martin and I. Deutsch, based on Rydberg-mediated interactions. See the preprint here.

- On the Ytterbium experiment, we report our first results preparing, controlling, and detecting arrays of nuclear spin qubits of ¹⁷¹Yb. We observe high fidelity control with sub-microsecond pulse times. We also demonstrate low-entropy array preparation through deterministic loading techniques via the use of narrow-line transitions and Raman-sideband cooling to near the motional ground state. See the preprint here.

This year’s Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference took place on December 7-9 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Several big names spoke at the event, and it was a place to forge new partnerships and connections. For one lucky JILAn, the trip to this conference was sponsored by CUbit Quantum Initiative, (CUbit). "I am very grateful to Women in Quantum and CUbit for sponsoring me to attend the Q2B conference," Joanna Lis said. Lis is a graduate student within JILA Fellow Adam Kaufman's laboratory. "My research is looking at neutral atoms in tweezers. I was positively surprised on how much presence neutral atom platforms had within the conference," she added.