William Milner wins this year's GPMFC Student Poster Prize at DAMOP

Submitted by kennac on Thu, 06/03/2021 - 4:27 pm

Photo of William Milner

Image Credit
William Milner

This year's winner of the Group for Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants (GPMFC)  Student Poster Prize is JILA student William Milner. Milner's poster prize was won at DAMOP, which is a part of the American Physics Society (APS) and stands for Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics.

According to Milner: "Our work in the Ye lab is focused on developing next generation optical clocks. Pushing the state-of-the-art requires interrogating as many atoms as possible, thus understanding and controlling interactions at high atomic densities becomes increasingly important. This motivated our group to develop a three-dimensional optical lattice clock based on a degenerate Fermi gas. This experiment takes advantage of the high, correlated density of a degenerate Fermi gas to guard against on-site interaction shifts.

Our poster summarizes new ways to advance this system and achieve the longest atomic coherence times possible. To minimize decoherence, we propose new strategies including loading a low-entropy, nuclear spin-polarized Fermi gas into the lattice to minimize motional dephasing. To prepare and image this state with high fidelity, a new set of experimental tools were developed. More broadly, our clock platform provides a window to study new physics ranging from variations of fundamental constants to novel atom-light interactions." Congratulations William Milner!