Young

Aaron was once a film major at Wesleyan university, but, after realizing there were far too many photons involved in film, turned his focus to photonics and quantum optics. He worked briefly in the molecular photophysics lab at Wesleyan, studying the dynamics of laser induced breakdown in water, before transferring to Caltech. There, he completed a senior thesis under Professor Oskar Painter titled "Hybrid Electromechanical Qubits as Quantum Memory". This work involved the design of a hybrid quantum device containing a transmon qubit and nano-beam mechanical resonator that aimed to coherently transfer the state of the qubit to the long-lived phononic modes of the mechanical resonator. Working with individual qubits left Aaron excited by the prospect of coherent control over many-body quantum systems, particularly in the contexts of quantum simulation and the study of novel topological phases of matter. As a result, Aaron joined the Kaufman group as a graduate student, helping to build a new experiment that controls and reads out systems of many alkaline-earth atoms by combining the techniques of optical tweezers, precision spectroscopy, and quantum gas microscopy.