Dan M. Stamper-Kurn came to Berkeley following his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 2000) and postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology (1999 – 2001). He is the recipient of the 2000 APS Division of Atomic, Optical and Molecular Physics Outstanding Thesis award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2001 – 2003), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2002 – 2007), and the Presidential Young Investigator Award in Science and Engineering (2002). He holds the Class of 1936 Second Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences...
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 gravitational-wave detectors. In January 2025, Victoria will join UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in Physics.
Irfan Siddiqi received his AB (1997) in chemistry & physics from Harvard University. He then went on to receive a PhD (2002) in applied physics from Yale University, where he stayed as a postdoctoral researcher until 2005. Irfan joined the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2006. In 2006, Irfan was awarded the George E. Valley, Jr. prize by the American Physical Society for the development of the Josephson bifurcation amplifier. In 2007, he was awarded the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, and...
James Analytis joined the faculty in January 2013 as the Charles Kittel Chair in condensed matter physics, and served as Department Chair from 2020-2023. He received his B.Sc. in physics from Canterbury University in 2001 and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes' Scholar in 2006. At Oxford, he worked with Stephen Blundell and Arzhang Ardavan on experimental and computational studies of quasi-two dimensional organic superconductors. Following his graduate studies, Analytis was a Lloyd's Tercentenary Fellow at the University of Bristol, where he worked on...
Matt Pyle received B.S. in Physics (2001) and B.E. in Aerospace Engineering (2002) from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University (2012). Subsequently, he crossed the bay and was a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley Physics faculty as the Garland Assistant Professor in 2015.
Research Interests
Many of the questions that we would like to ask about the nature of the universe today, for example "could dark matter be composed of particles with mass less than that of a proton?", are simply impossible to answer with present...
Aziza is an experimental physicist working on hybrid quantum systems with Rydberg atoms, superconducting circuits, and diamond nanophotonics. Her interests include novel quantum interfaces and the generation of entangled resources across different platforms for quantum processing, communication, and sensing.
Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard, working on quantum networks based on silicon vacancy defects in diamond nanophotonic cavities. During her PhD at the University of Chicago, she worked on quantum transduction using Rydberg atoms in optical and superconducting...
Harry is an experimental physicist working in quantum science with neutral atom and superconducting qubit systems. His research interests include quantum computing, quantum error correction, many-body physics, and quantum sensing.
Currently, Harry is a senior research scientist at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford in 2015, and then received his Ph.D from Harvard in 2021 where he contributed to the development of the neutral atom platform for quantum information processing in the group of Mikhail Lukin. Harry was the 2022...
Chiara Salemi received her B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. She completed her Ph.D. in 2022 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she built the first lumped-element axion search, ABRACADABRA. She then went to Stanford University and SLAC National Laboratory where she was a KIPAC Porat Postdoctoral Fellow. She will be starting a position as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in January 2025.
Shimon Kolkowitz is an atomic physicist and quantum scientist, with his experimental research focusing on quantum sensing, precision measurement, and metrology. Shimon’s research group has pioneered new techniques and applications for ultra-precise optical atomic clocks, and new measurement tools that make use of atom-scale defects in diamond. Shimon was an undergraduate at Stanford University, graduating with distinction in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics. Shimon earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard in 2015 with advisor Professor Mikhail Lukin, where his research focused on...
Hartmut Häffner received his PhD in physics from the University of Mainz / Germany in 2000. After short periods as a Postdoctoral fellow in Mainz and Bangalore/India, he received a Feodor-Lynen fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation Germany and went to NIST / Gaithersburg as a guest researcher (2000-2001). In 2001 he moved to the University of Innsbruck / Austria as a university assistant where he held a Marie-Curie fellowship from the European Union from 2002 - 2004. From 2004 till 2009 he worked as senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum...