CONTEXT OF THE JOB: 

The Department of Physics and Astronomy and its faculty are recipients of substantial amounts of research funding from US Government Agencies including the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, The Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  Development and application of quantum sensors is an area of research in which maintaining a position of leadership is considered a matter of national priority.   

Optical clocks are the most accurate instruments ever realized by humankind. They have great potential for fundamental physics discovery as quantum sensors, e.g. for low-frequency gravitational wave detection or for dark matter searches. However, thus far optical clocks have used the same basic modality since the first atomic clocks were realized: uniform state preparation and interrogation of a sample of atoms. In contrast the quantum information science (QIS) toolbox has fine-grained controls now available where single atoms in large arrays are individually controlled, interrogated, and even entangled with other atoms. We seek to leverage the many-fold technical QIS advances to develop new algorithms for optical clocks as sensors for new physics, in collaboration with other QuSeC-TAQS researches. 

In the Q-SEnSE institute, an NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute, prominent quantum researchers in experiment and theory, science and engineering, from around the U.S. and internationally, collaborate to explore how advanced quantum sensing can discover new fundamental physics, develop and apply novel quantum technologies, provide tools for a national infrastructure in quantum sensing, and train a quantum savvy workforce.  

Professor Safronova group’s research is on the forefront effort to develop quantum sensors for fundamental physics, including searches for the dark matter which is one of the great unsolved puzzles of our Universe.  In this project, we will develop algorithms that efficiently use the available atomic resources for a given application, e.g. enhancing the stability of a clock by breaking it up into sub-ensembles, or applying different sequences to distinct clocks in a network in order to search for transient frequency shifts as a signal for new physics. With the Q-SEnSE funding, we will perform modeling of space mission with clocks, determine the anticipated sensitivity of various clocks and orbits to physics beyond the standard model, including dark matter, symmetry violations, space-time fluctuations of the fundamental constants, and modifications to general relativity.