News

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.

Our paper on high power light sources at magic wavelengths for neutral atom optical atomic clocks is published in RSI! https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0057619

A new national quantum research center draws on JILA Fellows' and their expertise to make the United States an international leader in quantum technology.

Congratulations Will!

The Office of Naval Research program rewards early career scientists “who show exceptional promise for doing creative research”—and JILA's Adam Kaufman's work with optical tweezers has earned that recognition.

Our paper was published in science; you can find it here. See also the news highlight by NIST: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/09/jilas-novel-atomic-clock-design-offers-tweezer-control

Our recent manuscript — "Microscopic control and detection of ultracold strontium in optical tweezer arrays" — was published in PRX (Phys. Rev. X 8, 041054). See also the viewpoint from Antoine Browaeys (Viewpoint: Alkaline Atoms Held with Optical Tweezers) and the JILA highlight!

We recently posted our first paper on arxiv! We demonstrate tweezer-trapping, single-particle imaging, light-shift free spectroscopy, and three-dimensional ground-state cooling of strontium!

In September, Aaron installed a camera to assemble a timelapse of the lab's development --- it takes a picture every 30 minutes from a corner in the ceiling. Here are some shots from that over the past 4 months, as well as some closeups of our new science system!