Group news and updates

October 25, 2024

We were fortunate to have Dr. Georg Raithel, one of the founding fathers of Rydberg physics, to visit us.

September 28, 2024

Many posters were displayed and much has been had during Frontiers in Optics conference at Denver CO by the members of William and Mary Quantum Optics group: Charris Gabaldon, Nic DeStefano, Rob Behary, Ziqi Niu and Kevin Su (and a fellow grad student from Seth Aubin's lab Will Miyahira).

September 3, 2024

We were fortunate to get a visit from Dr. Paul Hsu and his colleage Naibo Jiang from Spectral Energies to discuss the details of the joint project, aimed to develop better Rb cells for Rydberg EIT experiments.

August 27, 2024

Braking the grounds (or rather an optics table) for the new PINQueD experiment! The goal of this project is to use coherent interactions of light and atoms to monitor electric and magnetic fields in plasmas.

June 25, 2024

Our Optics team for camp BLAST attempted to teach high school students the wonders of wave-particle duality!

May-June 2024

Our group did a good showing during CLEO and DAMOP this year. Since it is hard to take a nice picture of a talk presentation, here are poster presentations from Rob Behary (CLEO), Nic DeStefano (DAMOP), Ziqi Niu (CLEO) and Charris Gabaldon (CLEO).

May 8, 2024

Surprises of CLEO. First, we had a small Quantum Optics reunion with Nik Prajapati and Hana Warner.

Second, Charris Gabaldon received Honorable Mention at DLS poster competition.

April 22, 2024

Our brilliant undergrads - Owen Rollins, Will Torg and Kalea Wan - presented their research during Physics Undergraduate Research Showcase.

April 19, 2024

Congratulations to Ramisa Rahman for receiving 2024 Physics Research Prize for the highest demonstrated achievement in physics research.

Also congratulations to Kevin Su for recieving 2024 E.G. Clark Memorial Scholarship, awarded to a rising senior who has demonstrated an outstanding aptitude for the study of physics.

April 12, 2024

Our long-standing friend and collaborator Dr. Yanhong Xiao visited us after a long time.

November 22, 2023

It was wonderful to welcome Dr. Mi Zhang to her old lab after so many years!

November 10, 2023

Today we are officially kicking off the collaborative projects with JLab and MITRE to unleash the power of quantum optics to help nuclear phycists to better diagnoze charged particles.

July 6, 2023

After 16 years we are updating the group webpage! This time it definitely takes a village to finally make it better-looking and user friendly.

March 31, 2023

Many of our graduate students presented in William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium!

Ziqi Niu shared his work about investigations of anti-parity symmetry breaking in atomic vapor.

Nic DeStefano explained how he used quantum atomic coherence to detect presence of electrons.

Rob Behary shared the details of his theoretical proposal for building a better electric field sensor using Rydberg EIT.

March 31, 2023

We were happy to have Dr. Nate Phillips coming back for a visit!

January 31, 2023

First in-person meeting of QNet collagoration: IN, Chen Qian, Shengwang Du and Jianming Wen, during 2023 Photonics West meeting at San Francisco.

December 12, 2022

It was wonderful to have Jamie McKelvy, our JPL collaborator and AI guru, visiting us at William and Mary, to work on VAMPIRE project with Mario and Eugeniy.

December 5, 2022

This year several of our group member attended Mid-Atlantic Section APS conference. Here Mario is presenting a poster about our vector magnetometer project.

November 4, 2022

It was a real pleasure to welcome Dr. Thomas Searles to William and Mary (with Drs. Mumtas Qazilbash and Enrico Rossi).

August 2, 2022

Spontaneous group reunion during DARPA SAVANT reporting meeting in Boulder, CO.

July 2022

It was wonderful to finally welcome our LSU theory collaborator Pratik Barge to Williamsburg for two productive weeks of quantum imaging and mode sorting.

May 31, 2022

We had a blast during DAMOP 2022, meeting old and new friends and our VAMPIRE collaborators.

May 21, 2022

It has been three years since we had a chance to properly celebrate our graduates and send them off with a proper salute! Today we are parting with four group members, and it is truly a bitter-sweet moment.
Sofia Brown, who has been in the group for three years is going for the new heights at University of Colorado, boulder

Jiahui Li flipping coasts to collapse his wavefunction at the Cal Tech Applied Physics department (at least for now).

Alex Toytyla has decided to flex his experimental muscles some more before committing to a formal PhD pursuit, working in photonics research at John Hopkins university

Caitlyn Marat will be helping Amazon’s world domination plans.

April 22, 2022

This year two of our seniors were supported by Virginia Space Grant Consortium, and they presented their research during the VGSC poster session.

April 2022

Two of our undergraduate students have received department awards this year!

Jiahui Li has received the Harrison prize, awarded to a senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics.

Sofia Brown is the recipient of the Physics Research Prize that is awarded to the senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics research.

March 25, 2022

Introducing Dr. Savannah Cuozzo!

June 14, 2021

Dr. Gleb Romanov, our former grad student, stopped by during his trip to Williamsburg! With Savannah Cuozzo, Nic DeStefano and Rob Behary.

July 24, 2020

Our former Ph.D student and current NIST researcher, Dr. Matt Simons, stopped by to visit!

From left to right: Matt Simons, Irina Novikova, Eugeniy Mikhailov, Savannah Cuozzo, Ziqi Niu and Nik Prajapati.

June 10, 2020

Introducing Dr. Scott Madaras!

Dr. Scott Madaras with his committee members during the virtual defense.

June 10, 2020

Introducing Dr. Nikunj Prajapati!

May 3, 2020

This year’s graduation activities moved to virtual space, but we could not let our graduates to leave without proper goodbye!
Hana Warner is moving North to continue her quantum adventures at Harvard

Alex Fay has decided to put his experimental skills of measuring magnetic field gradients into real use, is joining the staff of Corvid Inc.

Kangning Yang is heading across the country to articlee deeper into complexity of physics at Stanford University.

October 4, 2019

Introducing Dr. Jason Creeden!

September 16, 2019

Two of our seniors, Kangning Yang and Hana Warner, participated in the Undergraduate Research Simposium during the 2019 Frontiers in Optics conference in Washington, DC. Our grad students, Nik Prajapati and Savannah Cuozzo, also presented at the conference, but without photographic evidence.

May 12, 2019

Today we are saying goodbye to two of our group members!

Ravn Jenkins, who worked on magnetic field gradiometer is heading to Arizona to get a Ph.D. in Optics from U of A College of Optics.

Austin Kalasky, our quantum imaging expert, is heading to an engineering job in PA.

March 22, 2019

This year four of our group members presented their work during the 2019 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Aiden Harbick (top left) talked about observed changes in hysteresis curve in hysteresis curve in VO₂ thin film when probed by the optical probes of different frequencies.
Austin Kalatsky (top right) discussed the optimization of squeezed vacuum generation by optimization of spatial profile of the pump laser field.
Hana Warner (bottom left) presented the work she did past summer in Japan on medical applications of organic electrical circuits.
Kangning Yang (bottom right) have discussed the current status of the degenerate four-wave mixing experiment with optical vortices, which has been their joint project with Hana during this academic year.

January 5, 2019

Ravn Jenkins presents her senior research on magnetic gradiometer during the poster session during the 2019 Optics and Photonics Winter School in the University of Arizona.

November 29, 2018

Happy smile on the face of Alex Fay after the gradient coil he designed was successfully fit inside the existing magnetometer magnetic shielding.

May 13, 2018

Today we are parting to our own superman! Nathan Super, who mastered the elusive quantum squeezed light in the lab, is heading to the real world for a successful classical career.

March 16 and 17, 2018

Our graduate students shine during the 2018 Graduate Researh Symposium! Jason Creeden (top left) described his progress in increasing the photoelectric response of VO₂ thin films by controlling the doping of the substrates. Scott Madaras (top right) talked about new way to induce the structural transition in VO₂ via surface plasmon excitations. Savannah Cuozzo (bottom left) presented a poster about her investigations of vibration-insensitive laser, based on four-wave mixing in Rb. Nik Prajapati (bottom right) used the four-wave mixing effect for non-classical light generation.

February 23, 2018

We had several undergraduate group members presenting their research during the 2018 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Nathan Super gave a talk about generation of quantum-correlated optical fields via resonant four-wave mixing.

Our magnetometer team – Kangning Yang and Hana Warner (top) and Ravn Jenkins(bottom) presented a poster on their work on precision magnetic field measurements using Rb vapor.

January 26, 2018

It was a special pleasure to welcome back a former member of the Quantum Optics group, Kevin Cox’11, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory. Kevin gave a wonderful colloquium on why quantum entanglement is useful – or is it?

September 19, 2017

Our former student, Joe Goldfrank’09, stopped by to see the renovated building and tell us about his career as a nuclear submarine officer and, recently, a automatic submarine developer at DARPA.

From left to right: Kangning Yang, Irina Novikova, Joe Goldfrank, Eugeniy Mikhailov and Nik Prajapati.

May 14, 2017

Today we are saying goodbye to several of our group members! Dr. Mi Zhang will be applying her years of lab experience chasing squeezed light into designing optical systems in Shanghai.

Melissa Guidry, who successfully tamed first CPT atomic clocks and then single-photon camera, is heading to Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France as a Fulbright scholar

Zach Thomas, our magnetometer guru, is applying for government jobs.

April 11, 2017

This year Melissa’s research in multimode structure in atom-based squeezed vacuum generation was supported by Virginia Space Grant Consortium, and she presented her research during the VGSC conference.

April 3, 2017

Introducing Dr. Gleb Romanov!

Dr. Romanov with his Ph.D. adviser Irina Novikova and Nik Prajapati, who inherited Gleb’s project in the lab.

March 25, 2017

Our graduate students had a chance to share their research with the world during the 2017 Graduate Research symposium. Demetry talked about a gyroscope with tailorable dispersion, the project he worked on last summer.

Nik shared his latest results on controlling the four-wave mixing using Raman absorption in a ladder configuration.

March 20, 2017

Introducing Dr. Mi Zhang!

Dr. Zhang with her Ph.D. adviser Eugeniy Mikhailov and committee members Irina Novikova and Alberto Marino (U. of Oklahoma).

February 17, 2017

Melissa Guidry, our Quantum Superstar, has received the Harrison prize, awarded to a senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics.

February 10, 2017

Dr. Lauren Aycock shared with us her fascinating studies of Broanian motion of solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates.

From left to right: Nik Prajapati, Lauren Aycock and Irina Novikova.

January 20, 2017

Eugeniy Mikhailov and Mi Zhang demonstrate their medals for 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize for LIGO detection of the gravitational waves.

September 23, 2016

Dr. Hebin Li (Florida International University) gave a fascinating colloquium about use of ultrafast nonlinear optical interaction to get better grip on quantum dynamics of complex systems.

From left to right: Hebin Li, Melissa Guidry, Mi Zhang, and Eugeniy Mikhailov.

June 28, 2016

Introducing Dr. Ellie Radue!

May 15, 2016

Today we are saying goodbye to four long-term members of our group!

Both Haley Bauser(left) and Ashna Aggarwal(right) are travelling west: Haley is starting graduate program in Caltech, and Ashna - at UCLA.

Owen Wolfe(top) is heading to Montana State University. Hunter Rew(bottom) is going to apply to graduate school next year, while working as software engineer at Decisive Analytics.

April 6, 2016

Brilliant ladies of Quantum optics! Haley Bauser won the Alumni research award given to the senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics research.

Melissa Guidry received the Clark award, awarded to a rising senior, who has demonstrated an outstanding aptitude for the study of physics. She is also 2016 Goldwater scholar.

February 15, 2016

Together with the rest of the world we are celebrating the announcement of the gravitational wave detection by LIGO collaboration. The best part is that four members of our group (Hunter Rew, Eugeniy Mikhailov, Gleb Romanov and Mi Zhang) are the co-authors on the seminal PRL detection paper. Plus, Melissa Guidry spent her summer working for the European gravitational observatory VIRGO.

October 16, 2015

Dr. Eden Figueroa (Stony Brook) visited us to discuss wonderful things one can do with warm atoms, and share his newest results on polarization quantum memory.

From left to right: Eugeniy Mikhailov, Eden Figueroa, Irina Novikova, Owen Wolfe, Melissa Guidry, Haley Bauser.

October 2, 2015

It is always great to see old friends: Nathan Belcher, who was our group’s first undergraduate student, has stopped by. Nathan is currently a physics teacher in NC, and is working on his Ph.D. in education.

August 7, 2015

Summer is a busy research time for us, and the undergraduate members of our team presented the results of their summer projects during REU poster session.

Nisha Grewal (Wesleyan University) successfully reconstructed the quantum state of a squeezed optical field.
Joseph Ghobrial (Saint Peter’s University) investigated EIT and four-wave mixing in Rb vapor.

Owen Wolfe (WM) contributed in significant improvement of the fast-light optical gyroscope experiment.

June 11, 2015

DAMOP conference in Columbus, OH, gave us a wonderful chance to have a group reunion of some former and some current group members!
Mi Zhang and Gleb Romanov presented their research during poster session.

May 17, 2015

Another graduation, and we are wishing best of luck to Kelly Roman, who will be teaching physics in high schools after finishing another year at WM School of Education.

March 20, 2015

Ellie Radue received Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the Natural and Computational Science during 14th Annual Graduate Symposium.

July 27, 2014

William and Mary Physics Department hosted 2014 ICAP Summer school, opening its door to more than hundred young researcher from all over the world.

July 29, 2014

During the ICAP Summer School we were lucky to have Lukas Slodicka from Palacky University in Olomouc (Czech Republic) visiting our lab.

July 26, 2014

Summers tend to be very busy times in the lab, and this one was not an exception. In addition to our regular team of graduate students, we had four wonderful undergrads! Donna Taylor is an REU student from Weber university, who developed an optical filter based on Faraday rotation in Rb vapor.

Kelly Roman studied four-wave mixing processes in a paraffin-coated Rb cell.

Owen Wolfe have designed and built several electronic devices to stabilized the frequency of lasers, that are now used in the squeezed vacuum experiment, run by Mi Zhang.

Josh Hill worked on the superluminal gyroscope experiment, but due to untimely death of two lasers he spent some time on electronics.

June 26, 2014

Introducing Dr. Matt Simons!

June 3, 2014

Mi Zhang and Gleb Romanov presented their research during poster session at DAMOP’14 in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin

May 12, 2014

This year we are saying goodbuy to two members of the group: Jesse Evans(left) will continue his scientific adventures as a graduate student in Dartmouth, and Joe Scholle(right) is on search for a great programming job.

March 21 and 22, 2014

Three of our graduate students have participated in 2014 Graduate Research Symposium. Gleb Romanov gave an update on storage time measurements in quantum memory experiment.
Ellie Radue reported on variation in dynamics of photoinduced metal-insulator transition in vanadium dioxide thin films at various temperatures.
During the poster session Mi Zhang presented a preliminary results of her studies of spatial mode structure of squeezed vacuum optical field. Our resent graduate, Travis Horrom, who is currently a postdoc at NIST stop by to say hi.

February 28, 2014

Ashna Aggarwal and Haley Bauser presented intermediate results of their experiment on optical properties of vanadium dioxide thin films during 2014 Undergraduate Research Symposium.

February 18, 2014

Jesse Evans presented his senior project on slow and fast light in a ring cavity during 2014 Honors colloquium.

November 8, 2013

It is always great when our group alumni come to visit. Our former undergraduate Will Ames (now a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder) with out current senior Jesse Evan and senior graduate student Gleb Romanov.

October 8, 2013

This year we had an all-girl team representing our group at the Frontiers in Optics conference in Orlando, FL! Mi Zhang talked about her experiments with a donut-shaped squeezed vacuum, and Ellie Radue reported on her investigation of the ultrafast metal-to-insulator phase transition in vanadium dioxide thing films.

August 21, 2013

We had a wonderful visit with Prof. Igor Sololov from St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, and our old friend, Prof. Mark Havey from Old Dominion University.

May 23, 2013

Our visitor and AMO seminar speaker, Elizabeth Goldschmidt from NIST.

May 12, 2013

Another graduation, and so many people are graduating from our group today! Dr. Travis Horrom will continue his illustrious career in quantum optics working with Dr. Paul Lett’s group in NIST, Geithersburg.

Evan Crisman is also heading north to start in the master program in medical physics, University of Pennsylvania.

Matt Argao will also be applying to medical school next year.

Bain Bronner is looking for a real job, although there is likely a graduate school in Engineering in his future.

And congratulations to Mi Zhang who got her Master of Science degree! She was too busy in the lab to get dressed up! :)

April 26, 2011

Bain Bronner received an Alumni prize awarded to the Physics senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics research.

March 22 and 23, 2013

All our graduate students have participated in 2013 Graduate Research Symposium. Travis Horrom gave a talk on quantum-enhanced magnetometer.
During the poster session Mi Zhang described her measurements of squeezed vacuum with unusual transverse profile, while Gleb Romanov reported on faster-than-light squeezed vacuum pulses propagation.
Matt Simons gave a poster update on progress toward non-classical light generation in a whispering gallery mode disc.
Special thanks to Ellie Radue who took most of the photos, and unfortunately, were left photoless herself. Her talk was about effect of substrate on properties of vanadium dioxide films.

March 14, 2013

Introducing Dr. Travis Horrom!

February 22, 2013

Bain Bronner and Evan Crisman reported their senior research achievements during 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium.

February 2, 2013

Matt Simons, Gleb Romanov and Irina Novikova have traveled across the continent to attend 2013 Photonics West conference.

November 19, 2012

Irina with our collaborator Arturo Lezama (right) and his colleague Horacio Failache (left) during her visit to Arturo’s group at the (Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay).

October 27, 2012

Congratulations to Evan Chrisman whose research on anisotropy in Vanadium dioxide thin films received a honorable mention during PhysicsFest’12 student poster competition.

July 30, 2012

What a busy and productive summer we had! And so many new great people!
Logan Stagg was a fantastic REU student who built an apparatus and observed lossless slow and fast light in Rb atoms. This is the first step toward construction of enhanced atomic optical gyroscope.

Joe Sultanis and Mi Zang put together another experimental setup for measuring vacuum squeezing in Rb. By shaping the input laser beam with a phase mask they made a 1-dB vacuum squeezed donut.

Chris Flint conducted a very colorful investigation of nonlinear frequency generation in Lithium Niobate crystals using various lasers, as well as designed a green balanced photodetector.

July 8, 2012

Ellie Radue and I took a few trip down to NASA Langley research center to measure Raman spectra of various VO₂ films, working with Dr. Buzz Wincheski.

June 27, 2012

Chris Flint (on photo) and Matt Simons explore the multicolored nonlinear frequency generation in Lithium Niobate crystal using femtosecond laser.

June 4, 2012

Eugeniy Mikhailov, Travis Horrom and Gleb Romanov presented on DAMOP’12 conference in Orange County, CA.

May 12, 2012

One more year has passed, and again we are saying goodbye to two members of the group: Jacob Fry will be applying the graduate programs in physics next year.

Pavel Zhuravlev is heading to NRL for summer internship, and then to marine training school.

And congratulations to Ellie Radue who got her Master of Science degree today!

April 6, 2012

We were fortunate to host Prof.  Nergis Mavalvala (MIT) - one of the scientific leaders of LIGO.

From left to right: Katya Mikhailova, Eugeniy Mikhailov, Nergis Mavlavala, Gleb Romanov, Travis Horrom, Irina Novikova, Ellie Radue.

March 30, 2012

Bain Bronner has spent a lot of time this semester polishing (and repolishing) CaF whispering-gallery mode discs and aligning (and realigning) the coupling setup. Finally his hard work is starting to pay off as he finally was able to observes the cavity modes!

March 23, 2012

Many physics students have presented their research in the Graduate Research Symposium. Among them was Travis Horrom, reporting latest development in squeezed vacuum generation and manipulation.

Matt Simons has won the top prize for his research on nonlinear optics in whispering gallery mode resonators. Matt was not able to attend due to injury, but he managed to record his talk to be played in the award session (and it worked!).

February 24, 2012

Our senior Jake Fry has presented the progress in development of vector atomic magnetometer during the Undergraduate Research Symposium.

October 22, 2011

Physicsfest this year was a big success! Eugeniy Mikhailov explains laser operation to interested visitors.

October 17, 2011

We are adding new color to our palette by generating blue second harmonic light using KLN from Shasta Crystals.

September 23, 2011

We had a wonderfully productive and inspiring visit from Prof. Jon Dowling from Luisiana State University.

From left to right: Gleb Romanov, Kebei Jiang (LSU), Eugeniy Mikhailov, Jonathan Dawling, Irina Novikova, Travis Horrom.

August 19, 2011

How many physicists you need to move a laser? At least five! The 1 mJ femtosecond laser system from Coherent has finally arrived and will be installed very soon.

From left to right: Gleb Romanov, Pasha Zhuravlev, Travis Horrom, Matt Simons, Eugeniy Mikhailov.

June 24, 2011

Introducing Dr. Nate Phillips!

May 16, 2011

Another bittersweet moment: two more people are graduating!
Kevin Cox is moving up - literally! He will be shortly on his way to the University of Colorado, Boulder Ph.D. program.

David Gribbin (aka Quint) will be spending next year preparing for law school exams meanwhile, he stays with us for another month to help keep experiments running.

May 6, 2011

We had a very short by very interesting visit from two LSU graduate students, working with Prof. Jon Dowling. Another student of his - Robi - worked with us last semester on PSR squeezing experiment. From left to right:Robi Singh (LSU), Kebei Jiang (LSU), Nate Phillips (WM), Gleb Romanov (WM), Kaushik Seshadreesan (LSU), Matt Simons (WM), and Travis Horrom (WM).

April 26, 2011

Kevin Cox received an Alumni prize awarded to the Physics senior with the highest demonstrated achievement in physics research. Below, Kevin with Physics Department chair Keith Griffioen at the award ceremony.

April 18, 2011

This year the work of two of our students were supported by Virginia Space Grant Consortium, and they presented their finding during the VGSC conference in Newport News. Matt Simons gave a talk on the nonlinear optics in crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator, and Kevin Cox (photo below) presented a poster about his work on the idea of an atomic vector magnetometer.

February 18, 2011

This year two of our undergraduate students participated in 12th undergraduate research symposium. Kevin Cox (top) gave a talk about development of a vector magnetometer based on EIT in Rb vapor, and David Gribbin (bottom) presented a poster about production and coupling of whispering gallery mode resonator discs.

October 1, 2010

It is always great to see old friends, and we were delighted to welcome Yuri Rostovtsev (U. of North Texas) and his wife Natasha in Williamsburg.

September 30, 2010

Past summer was very busy with work and travel. Our squeezing experiment has travelled 100 miles south to Old Dominion university, where in collaboration with Prof. Mark Havey we’ve attempted to see squeezing in cold atomic clowd. Dr. Arturo Lezama joined us in early September for the final push. Although we didn’t get many dB of squeezed light, the results are definitely encouraging, and we’ve learned a lot!

The squeezing team (from left to right):Arturo Lezama, Eugeniy Mikhailov, Mark Havey, Salim Balik, Travis Horrom.

The real squeezing team with the experimental apparatus.

June 7, 2010

We were very happy to have a chance to welcome our long-term collaborator, Dr. Alexey Gorshkov, before he moves to West coast to start his postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech Institute for Quantum Information. From left to right: Gleb Romanov, Irina Novikova, Nate Phillips, Alexey Gorshkov.

May 16, 2009

Here is this day again when we say bood-bye to two our recent graduates.
Francesca Fornasini is reaching for the starts: she is on her way to the University of California, Berkeley Astronomy Ph.D. program.

Paul Stubbs is shifting his focus from physics to finances, and continues in the master program in Accounting here, at the College of William and Mary.

Peng Xu has received his Master of Physics degree today as well.

April 16, 2010

Our guest colloquium speaker Dr. Karen Sauer with Seth Aubin and Eugeniy Mikhailov in the hall oh the new research wing of Small hall.

March 26, 2010

This page has started with pictures of an empty lab, and it is time to show them again. Except this time these are the pictures of our new lab in recently (and not completely) finished research wing of Small hall. We should be moving in approximately one week.

February 26, 2010

This year two of our undergraduate students participated in 11th undergraduate research symposium. Kevin Cox (top) presented a poster about his work on developing a compass magnetometer based on EIT, and Francesca Fornasini (bottom, with Justin Vazquez and Ryan Zielinski) gave a talk about her work toward new imaging technique of ultracold atoms using four-wave mixing.

February 4, 2010

Our good friend and collaborator Dr. Arturo Lezama (Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay) visited us again. He and Travis Horrom spent a lot of hours working on the polarization self-rotation squeezing experiment.

December 11, 2009

Our distinguished visitor Prof. Dmitry Budker (UC Berkeley) with Seth Aubin, Irina Novikova and Eugeniy Mikhailov.

November 6, 2009

In attempt to increase the number of (potential) women in science we are pleased to present the newest group member: Alyssa Mikhailova.

October 6, 2009

While most of our research involves pretty sophisticated and expensive equipment, sometimes a simple iron becomes a research apparatus. Kevin Cox spent last couple week learning how to make printed boards from scratch using iron and laser printer. Looks like we have a first success!

June 3, 2009

Prof. Mark Havey, our old friend from Old Dominion University, and Dr. Dmirty Kupriyanov, our new friend from St. Petersburg Politechnic University, visited us today for a productive afternoon of physics discussions.

May 17, 2009

Graduations are always bitter-sweet, and today we are saying goodbye to two members of the group who were with us almost from the very beginning of the lab. William Ames is heading to the graduate program in Physics in the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Joseph Goldfrank is following his life-long dream - to be an officer at a nuclear submarine. First step after college - U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School, and then Naval Nuclear Power School.

And luckily, we still don’t need to part with this guy for a few years - Matt Simons got his Master of Science degree today!

May 8, 2009

Dr. Yanhong Xiao, former colleague of Irina at CfA and now a professor at Fudan University (China) visited our group and presented an AMO seminar.

April 2, 2009

Nathan Belcher, who has graduated from our group in December 2008, is now a science teacher in the Williamsburg Christian Academy, and today he brought his Physics class for the tour of our department.

February 27, 2009

Two students in our group participated in campus-wide undergraduate research symposium. Joe Goldrfank (top) presented a poster about his research on the nonlinear magneto-optical polarization rotation, and Will Ames (bottom) gave a talk about his studies of optical vortices.

October 31, 2008

Dr. George R. Welch (Texas A&M University) - the academic father of Irina and Eugeniy - visited our lab.

October 30, 2008

What has started as a hopelessly optimistic proposal to the Army Research Office 14 months ago finally materialized in the form of brand new Ti:Sapphire laser. This laser will be shared between ours and Dr. Seth Aubin’s research groups.

October 2, 2008

Dr. Arturo Lezama (Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay) is visiting us this week to help us with better understanding of the polarization self-rotation squeezing.

September 19, 2008

Any birthday requires a party, and today we celebrated the birth of the College of William&Mary Student Chapter of the Optical Society of America.
More party pictures here!

August 1, 2008

Today we were saying good-bye to two wonderful summer REU students: Martha Roseberry (College of Wooster) and Tom Noel (U. of Wisconsin). Both of them accomplish a lot for the short 10 week! Martha built an optical network that connects our laboratory with the laboratory of Dr. Seth Aubin for future sharing of a Ti:Sapphire laser.
Tom conducted a very detailed experimental study of quantum noise properties near atomic resonance. He is also a current world-wide record holder on polarization self-rotation squeezing: -1.2dB below the shot noise limit. (Ok, may be the number is not too impressive, but hey! - that’s the best for our method!)

July 28, 2008

We’ve been so busy here this summer, we didn’t even have time to post anything! Here is our hard-working summer crew - at work and at Sunday cookout.
From left to right: Tom Noel (summer REU student from U. of Wisconsin), Will Ames, Matt Simons, Nathan Belcher, Nate Phillips, Martha Roseberry (summer REU student from C. of Wooster), Eugeniy Mikhailov, Chris Carlin, Irina.

June 17, 2008

Dr. Matt Eisaman (NIST) visited W&M to give a special AMO seminar and to teach us how to properly store and count photons.
From left to right: Chris Carlin, Irina, Nate Phillips, Matt Eisaman, Eugeniy, Will Ames and Tom Noel (our summer REU student).

May 30, 2008

This year our group presented the results of the squeezing experiment and stored light optimization experiment at DAMOP conference that took place at State College, PA. On the photo below Nate Phillips explains the magic of slow light to unidentified physicist.

May 21, 2008

Recently we have submitted two papers describing our work on stored light optimization: arXiv:0805.3348 and arXiv:0805.1927! To celebrate the occasion we have recreated the William&Mary logo: we send a “W” into a vapor cell, and it was magically transformed into “M” at the output after being optimally stored in atomic spins.

In addition it turned out that the photo of AMO group in William&Mary has been featured at June 2008 Optics&Photonics News magazine!
Click on picture to enlarge.

May 11, 2008

Congratulations to Nathan Belcher, who successfully complete his work for BS in Physics! Since Nathan will officially graduate only in December, he will stay with us for the summer to more exciting work on atomic clocks!

April 9, 2008

Congratulations to Nate Phillips for winning the first place in Physical sciences in the student poster competition during Hampton Roads 2008 Research Expo. (Left) Our team together with Dr. Seth Aubin’s group members at the poster session. (Right) The happy winner a minute after the prizes were announced.

March 28, 2008

Dr. Carlos Lopez-Mariscal (NIST) visited our department. Carlos gave two presentation: an information session about Optical Society of America (OSA) student-related programs, and an AMO seminar on optical tweezers with evanescent waves.

March 21, 2008

Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle (MIT) visited our lab during his visit to W&M.

February 13, 2008

Very productive week for our group! First news is that the first paper based solely on the experimental results from our lab in William and Mary. E. E. Mikhailov and I. Novikova, “Low-frequency vacuum squeezing via polarization self-rotation in Rb vapor,” submitted to Opt. Lett. (2008).

Second news - we have a home-made atomic clock working in the lab! We can lock frequency of rf oscillator to CPT resonance and improve its stability more than two orders of magnitude. The overall stability is not great, and we will be working on improving it with clever CPT resonance schemes.

December 21, 2007

Will Ames is conducting the experiment which will use optical vortices phase masks for optical filtering. The intensity distributions of a laser beam passed through the phase mask with and without interference are shown in Figs. (a) and (b) for a single m=1 vortex, and two vortices close to each other in Figs. (c) and (d). The phase mask is generously lended to us by Dr. Grover Swartzlander (University of Arizona).

December 7, 2007

A long overdue picture of Dr. Charles Sukenik (ODU): he visited us in September, but had to come again for a picture.

November 9, 2007

Dr. Ron Walsworth (Harvard) inspects the lab during his visit.

October 19, 2007

Our visitor, Dr. Frank Narducci (Naval Air Systems Command).

October 6, 2007

Our senior student Nathan Belcher presents a poster about his VCSEL work during the annual Celebration of Summer Research symposium.

July 9, 2007

We have successfully demonstrated efficient high-frequency modulation of a VCSEL laser. This system will be used in atomic clock experiment.

June 29, 2007

Of coarse, summer is the busiest time in the labs, but we like to have some fun too! On Friday nights AMO group relaxes by making ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. The goal of this experiment - to find the best flavors!

March 30, 2007

Dr. Bill Phillips (NIST) visited our lab during his visit to W&M.

March 23, 2007

Drs. Seth Aubin, Irina Novikova and Eugeniy Mikhailov with our visitors - Dr. Mark Havey from Old Dominion University, and Dr. Alexey Trifonov, MagiQ.

February 2007

Slow/stored light experiment is operational!

December 2006

November 2006

October 2006