Are you a eager to build state-of-the-art experiments and use them to explore quantum physics in a lively, international group?

Our Strontium Quantum Gases Group is looking for ambitious PhD students who want to participate in exciting quantum simulation, sensing and computing experiments. This group is headed by Prof. Florian Schreck and is part of the Quantum Gases & Quantum Information (QG&QI) cluster at the Institute of Physics (IoP) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and also hosts the Quantum Delta NL Ultracold Quantum Sensing Testbed. We use ultracold Sr gases for quantum sensing, to study many-body quantum physics and for quantum computing. We have three open PhD positions, one each on the research projects described below. For more information about the projects take a look at our website or contact Florian Schreck.

What are you going to do?
You will build a new type of optical clock, a continuous superradiant clock. Optical clocks are extremely precise, going wrong by only one second over the lifetime of the universe and being able to measure gravitational time dilation of just a cm height difference [1]. This precision is obtained by measuring the frequency of narrow optical transitions, in our case of strontium. Usual optical clocks operate in a pulsed manner, first laser cooling a gas of atoms to a few microKelvin (in order to suppress the Doppler effect) and then spectroscopically determining the transition frequency. By contrast, our clock will operate continuously and we will entice our atoms to emit light on the clock transition directly. This challenging endeavour is made realistic by our continuous ultracold Sr source technology [2] combined with superradiant lasing of those atoms in an optical cavity [3]. You will enter a new regime of experimental physics, providing a rich landscape for explorations. On the more applied side, superradiant clocks should provide high precision already after a short averaging time, which is important for many clock applications.

You will be joining our clock team at a very interesting time. Most building blocks of the new clock have been constructed and we are excited to put these blocks together and to bootstrap the clock. By joining our team you will learn about all aspects of the clock, from its rich underlying physics, to its high-tech components (electronics, lasers, optics, frequency combs, ultrastable resonators, vacuum,…). This project is embedded in a larger research effort within Quantum Delta NL on quantum sensing with ultracold atoms, which also encompasses atom lasers, zero-deadtime clocks, time and frequency dissemination, and quantum computing.

References

1. Andrew D. Ludlow, Martin M. Boyd, Jun Ye, E. Peik, and P. O. Schmidt, Optical atomic clocks, Rev. Mod. Phys. 87, 637 (2015).
2. Chun-Chia Chen (陳俊嘉), Rodrigo González Escudero, Jiří Minář, Benjamin Pasquiou, Shayne Bennetts, Florian Schreck, Continuous Bose-Einstein condensation, Nature 606, 683 (2022).
3. Matthew A. Norcia, Matthew N. Winchester, Julia R. K. Cline and James K. Thompson, Superradiance on the millihertz linewidth strontium clock transition, Science Advances 2, e1601231 (2016).

Tasks and responsibilities:

• Constructing, bootstrapping and using ultracold atom experiments;
• conducting research, resulting in academic publications in peer-reviewed international journals and/or books;
• supervising Bachelor and Master theses and tutoring students;