Thompson Group

James Thompson group

Schäfer

Vera is a postdoctoral research associate working on realising a continuous-wave superradiant laser using Strontium atoms in a high finesse ring cavity. She joined the lab in 2021 coming from the University of Oxford where she was working on trapped ion quantum computing.

 

Song

Eric joined the lab in Spring 2022 after graduating from New York University Shanghai. At NYU, he worked on entangling BECs with Prof. Tim Byrnes, as well as phase transitions in the Vicsek model and Ising model with Prof. Paul Chaikin, Charles Newman and Daniel Stein. Currently he is working on simulating many-body physics with strontium atoms.

 

Niu

Zhijing joined the group in fall 2021 after graduating from Xi’an Jiaotong University. In the past, she worked on condensed matter experiments with Prof. Mengkun Liu at Stony Brook University as an exchange student. After that, she switched her interest to AMO physics and did a gap year in Prof. John Doyle’s group at Harvard University where she worked on laser cooling ytterbium hydroxide. She did her first year of graduate school remotely in China and worked in Prof. ‪Matthias Weidemüller’s group on Rydberg atoms at USTC.

Koh

Vanessa joined the lab in Fall 2019 after earning her MPhil from University of Cambridge. Her masters work with Ulrich Schneider focused on building an experiment to study many-body physics in systems with a kagome geometry. Previously, she worked at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore with Loh Huanqian on quantum simulation and with Murray Barrett on quantum metrology. She is currently working on the Rubidium experiment, which applies cavity-QED to study different phenomena such as matter-wave interferometry and momentum exchange physics. 

Norcia

Matt graduated in August 2017.  He went on to work with Adam Kaufman at JILA as an NRC postdoctoral fellow. Matt helped to start a strontium tweezer experiment and demonstrated a tweezer clock among other accomplishments.  Matt then moved to IQOQI to work with Francesca Ferlaino on quantum droplet experiments in dysprosium.  He is now working at Atom Computing in Boulder on tweezer-based quantum computing.

Chen

Zilong successfully defended his PhD thesis in July 2013 titled "Breaking Quantum Limits with Collective Cavity-QED: Generation of Spin Squeezed States via Quantum Non-Demolition Measurements."  He then went on to study diamond NV centers for magnetometry as part of the Quantum Sensors/Quantum Optics group of Leonid Krivitskiy working at the Data Storage Institute in Singapore (http://www.dsi.a-star.edu.sg/Pages/index.aspx) .

Bohnet

Justin successfully defended his PhD thesis December 2013.  His thesis is titled "A superradiant laser and spin squeezed states:  collective phenomena in a rubidium cavity QED system for enhancing precision measurements."  Justin was awarded a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and worked on trapped ion simulators of quantum many-body systems with John Bollinger in the Ion Storage group at NIST, Boulder.  He is currently leading work on trapped ion quantum computing at Quantinuum.

Young

Dylan joined the lab in Fall 2018 after graduating from Yale University. In the past, he has worked with Sohrab Ismail-Beigi in computational condensed matter physics, as well as with Liang Jiang on quantum error correcting codes. He is currently working on the strontium experiment, exploring spin squeezing and beyond mean-field dynamics.

Wu

Baochen joined the lab in Fall 2015. He defended his thesis in 2021.  His thesis focused on techniques for controlling the coupling of atoms to a standing wave cavity mode.

Cline

Julia joined the lab in Fall 2015, after graduating from Williams College. At Williams, she worked with Ward Lopes and received highest honors for her thesis "The Evolution of Order in Thin Film Diblock Copolymer Systems". In grad school, she received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. At DAMOP 2018, she won best poster for the Topical Group on Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants (GPMFC) poster competition, in the Atomic Clocks and Sensors section.