Among the brilliantly technical and creative minds JILA is home to, postdoctoral researcher Jake Higgins applies the best of both worlds to their work in the group of JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder physics professor Jun Ye. Leveraging their multi-disciplinary background, Higgins is advancing nuclear clock technology.

Higgins’ proclivity for developing a well-rounded skillset began in high school.

“I had a high school teacher who taught Calculus and World History,” says Higgins. “He was kind of a renaissance person who was really smart in a lot of different areas. That was inspiring to me. Then that was amplified by going to a liberal arts college.” 

In their undergraduate studies at Hendrix College, Higgins majored in Chemical Physics. 

“I spent about two thirds of my major there studying chemistry, and a third physics. I’ve been straddling the line between the two subjects since then,” they add.

Drawn to institutions where they could indulge their multi-faceted interests, Higgins nurtured their continued growth in graduate school at the University of Chicago. There, Higgins studied excited state energy transfer dynamics in molecules, ultimately discovering a way to unravel dynamics in nonlinear spectra under professor Greg Engel. This NSF-GRFP supported work is central to understanding how nature optimizes photosynthetic systems.

"There were lots of great ultrafast spectroscopists at UChicago, but many of them were quite different in their style and approach,” notes Higgins. “They were all impactful in their own way. It was great to be raised in an environment where I saw a large parameter space of successful types of scientists.”

Having gained spectroscopic expertise in the realm of biophysics and molecular spectroscopy in addition to their appreciation for different approaches to research, Higgins sought a postdoctoral position where their array of technical skills could grow. 

“In experimental work, sometimes you find very engineering-minded people who build amazing things, [but] sometimes get stuck in the weeds,” they say. “On the other end, there are very creative people who are ready to execute step 5,000, but don’t know what to do for steps two and three.” Higgins found JILA to be place where these camps come together—ideal for refining their own skills.

In Ye’s group, Higgins is part of the team that recently measured the thorium-229 nuclear clock transition. The team had to employ a range of skills and knowledge of fields including solid state, strong field, and nuclear physics to make the thorium clock tick. The experiment “pulls from these separate fields, so it seems like the best balance that I could have reached,” Higgins said, reflecting on their experience.

“This project does have a lot of multidisciplinary components, and it’s been surprising to find times where my previous work applied to this problem. This project is very fun because we're experts on some components like the laser system, but we're kind of novices at other parts of the project such as nuclear theory.” 

As an endeavor that demands breadth of expertise, the thorium nuclear clock also has the potential for breadth of application such as precision time keeping, quantum sensing, and more. 

“With a bit more work on our measurement, we might soon access questions in fundamental physics like the variation of the fine structure constant,” adds Higgins.

Having made significant contributions to metrology, Higgins plans to apply methods from the thorium nuclear clock project to fundamental questions in chemical physics. However, in physical chemistry, the systems studied are simply too large and complex over which to exercise complete control. 

“Whenever you get up into the complexity of liquid-phase chemistry—such as what I’m thinking about studying, like enzymes or photocatalysts—when you’re in that realm, quantum mechanics plays a role, but I would say it’s equal parts quantum mechanics and equal parts statistical mechanics," Higgins elaborated. "You have to think about quantum mechanics, but you also have to think about chaos and complexity and fluctuations and inhomogeneous distributions. These all wash out the quantum dynamics to us as macroscopic observers. I’m very driven by the idea of taking intractably complex systems and trying to make them tractable with very precise tools. AMO physicists have this amazing bottom-up control of atoms and molecules. I want to apply their approaches, maybe a little less pristinely, to this other world.”

Beyond the bounds of their multi-disciplinary research plans, Higgins is motivated to continue their advocacy work. Inspired by mentor figures at Hendrix, Higgins found “a lot of really brilliant people, really good scientists, but who love to teach and love to use their platform for other people.” 

Determined to carry that spirit with them, Higgins was a co-director of UChicago’s Graduate Recruitment Initiative Team (GRIT). GRIT’s mission is to improve recruitment and retention of people from backgrounds historically underrepresented in STEM.

At JILA, Higgins has continued giving back to their community, where they co-founded the JILA Postdocs Group alongside Rachael Merritt. The postdocs of JILA group regularly organizes events aimed at professional development and community building for the other postdoctoral researchers within the institute.

As a future professor, Higgins would like to use their platform to forge new academic spaces for students to thrive. 

“I’ve had to be more resilient than maybe I should have had to have been,” they say. "One thing I’m hoping to do in my academic career is be a space for people to show up as themselves.”

Written by Willa Arthur-Dworschack, University of Colorado Boulder Graduate Student and SCO mentee.