Shimon completed his bachelor’s at Stanford University before going to Harvard University where he completed his PhD work in the group of Mikhail Lukin. He then did his postdoc in Jun Ye’s group at JILA before moving to University of Wisconsin-Madison where is now an assistant professor working on doing new physics with novel clocks and NV centers. We asked Shimon some questions about his research and how he got involved in AMO!
Q: Tell us a bit about the exciting research you’ll be presenting at ICAP
Optical atomic clocks are the most accurate and precise measurement devices ever built by humankind. I will be presenting recent experimental results from my research group in which we demonstrated a new kind of optical atomic clock that consists of multiple clocks in one apparatus, and used it to perform a new laboratory-based test of general relativity. By doing comparisons between multiple atomic clocks that are located in the same vacuum chamber and share many of the same lasers, we are able to bypass many of the current limitations to optical atomic clock performance. As a result, we were able to test the relativistic time dilation due to Earth’s gravity from millimeter to centimeter differences in height. We also showed that we could use our measurements of the differences in the rates the clocks ticked at to determine their relative heights with millimeter scale resolution, which is a promising step towards using optical atomic clocks to map out Earth’s gravity and shape.
Q: For non-experts, can you give us a brief outline of why you’re studying optical atomic clocks?
Not only are optical atomic clocks the most precise and accurate tools we can build, but remarkably their performance has been improving at an accelerating rate. As these clocks keep getting better and better they are becoming sensitive to new and exotic physics. Optical clocks are now being used to test relativity, to search for dark matter, and to probe for new particles and forces. In the future optical clocks might also be used in gravitational wave detectors or to help predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. I am interested in exploring and developing these new and emerging applications of atomic clocks.
Q: How did you first get involved in AMO physics?
As an undergraduate I was fortunate enough to get involved in neutrino physics research. I was working on an experiment dedicated to searching for neutrino-less double beta decay (the “Enriched Xenon Observatory,” https://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/exo/) and the project I was working on involved spectroscopically identifying the daughter barium ions produced by double beta decay events. I was working on laser systems for spectroscopy of single barium ions in an ion trap, and I think I was permanently hooked on AMO physics the first time I saw the fluorescence from a single ion with my bare eyes. The graduate student who was mentoring me explained to me that other researchers around the country and the world were working on building quantum computers based on some of the same techniques we were working on in the lab, and I have been fascinated by the overlap between quantum information science and fundamental physics ever since.
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