Thompson Group

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. 

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.

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) .

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.

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.

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.

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.