Victoria Xu

Job title: 
Assistant Professor
Bio/CV: 

Victoria Xu received her B.S. in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, and her Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley. For her thesis, she worked with Professor Holger Müller on trapped cavity atom interferometers for precision measurements and fundamental physics. She then joined the MIT LIGO Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Associate, where she worked on commissioning the frequency-dependent squeezing upgrade for broadband quantum enhancement of the LIGO observatories. In January 2025, Victoria will join UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in Physics.


Select Publications

"Squeezing the quantum noise of a gravitational-wave detector below the standard quantum limit," W. Jia et al. (LIGO O4 detector list), Science 385, 1318-1321 (2024)

“Broadband quantum enhancement of the LIGO detectors with frequency-dependent squeezing,” D. Ganapathy et al. (LIGO O4 detector list), Phys. Rev. X 13, 041021 (2023)

“Probing squeezing for gravitational-wave detectors with an audio-band field,” D. Ganapathy, V. Xu, W. Jia, C. Whittle, M. Tse, L. Barsotti, M. Evans, L. McCuller, Phys. Rev. D 105, 122005 (2022)

"Probing gravity by holding atoms for 20 seconds," V. Xu, M. Jaffe, C. D. Panda, S. L. Kristensen, L. W. Clark, H. Müller, Science 366, 745-749 (2019)

“Efficient adiabatic spin-dependent kicks in an atom interferometer,” M. Jaffe, V. Xu, P. Haslinger, H. Müller, and P. Hamilton, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 040402 (2018)

“Attractive force on atoms due to blackbody radiation,” P. Haslinger, M. Jaffe, V. Xu, O. Schwartz, M. Sonnleitner, M. Ritsch-Marte, H. Ritsch, and H. Müller, Nature Physics 14, 257-260 (2018)

Role: