Baumgaertner

Alex joined the Kaufman group as a postdoctoral researcher after completing his PhD in the group of Prof. Tilman Esslinger at ETH Zurich, where he explored topological and dissipative phenomena in a degenerate rubidium Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to ultrahigh-finesse cavity modes. His passion for tabletop AMO experiments began during his undergraduate studies at the University of Heidelberg, where he worked in the lab of Prof. Markus Oberthaler on generating arbitrary 1D optical potentials with acousto-optical devices for experiments with a degenerate 1D Bose gas. This experience led him to develop an interest in neutral atoms in optical tweezers, ultimately bringing him to Caltech for his Master’s thesis with Prof. Manuel Endres, where he was first introduced to alkaline-earth atoms in optical tweezers.

As a postdoc, Alex is exploring various research directions with the Ytterbium tweezer experiment in the Kaufman lab, including efforts toward demonstrating repeated quantum error correction and realizing quantum simulations of exotic spin models.