A number of Yale Physics Department researchers attended and presented their research at the 57th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) from June 1-5, 2026 in Providence, RI.
Associate professor David Moore was an invited speaker, presenting “Mechanical quantum sensors for dark matter and neutrinos,” as part of the invited session on Searches for New Physics with Quantum Sensors. He was also an author on two other talk presentations from his group:
- “Quantum-limited impulse sensing with optically-levitated nanoparticles,” (presented by Jacqueline Baeza-Rubio)
- “Force and acceleration sensing with optically levitated microparticles,” (presented by Lucas Darroch)
The authors contributing to these two presentations were: Moore; postdoctoral associates Darroch; Clarke Hardy, Aaron Markowitz, and Thomas Penny (now a postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden); and graduate students Baeza-Rubio, Joaquin Fernandez Odell, Cecily Lowe, Siddhant Mehrotra, Benjamin Siegel (Ph.D. ‘26, now a postdoctoral associate at Atominstitut, TU Wein), Yu-Han Tseng, Jiaxiang Wang (Applied Physics Ph.D. ‘25, now a postdoctoral scholar ad UCLA), and Molly Watts.
Baeza-Rubio said, “Since this was my first DAMOP conference, I wasn’t expecting the conference to be so vast. Coming from a particle physics background, I was surprised by how broad the field is. The talks covered an incredible range of topics, many of which were new to me. It was a little overwhelming at first, but it quickly became exciting to explore so many different areas of AMO physics.”
Baeza-Rubio continued, “I presented our group’s recent work on detecting individual gas collisions with a levitated nanoparticle, and recieved lots of thoughtful questions and discussions following my talk. Those conversations gave me a chance to learn about new ideas and connect with researchers working on problems I hadn’t encountered before. I left with a much broader perspective on AMO physics and a lot of ideas to think about. It was a fantastic first DAMOP, and I’m excited to come back in the future.”
Members of professor Jack Harris’ group presented a talk and two posters. The authors included Harris; research scientist Yogesh Patil; and graduate students Igor Brandão, Benjamin Capinski, Chitres Guria (Ph.D. ‘26, now a postdoctoral associate at MIT), Yinchen Hao, Theophilus Human, and Erin McGee.
- “Levitated Superfluid Helium Drops for Optomechanics” (talk presented by Human) as part of the session on Precision Sensing with Levitated Optomechanics.
- “Levitated Superfluid Helium Drops as Unclamped Optomechanical Cavities” (poster presented by Capinski)
- “Levitated Optomechanics with Spheres of Superfluid Helium” (poster presented by McGee)
Both posters were part of the GPMFC Poster Prize competition, see more information at the end of this article.
Assistant professor Charles Brown’s group was represented by graduate students Siddharth Mukherjee and Andrew Neely who presented posters.
- ”Dynamic Phase Control of a Quasiperiodic Optical Lattice” (presented by Neely)
- This poster’s authors included Brown; Yale Physics postdoctoral fellow Cedric Wilson; and graduate students Ryan Everly, Neely, and Raffaella Zanetti.
- “Designing a Multimode Cavity for a Degenerate Cavity QED Apparatus” (presented by Muckherjee)
- This poster’s authors were Brown, Mukherjee, and Ningyu Wang, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Associate professor of physics Nir Navon was an invited speaker, presenting “Probing quantum many-body dynamics in a uniform Fermi gas” as part of the session on Non-Equilibrium Phenomena in Ultracold Atoms.
On June 1, Yale Physics graduate student Eleanor Graham presented a poster at a workshop held in conjunction with DAMOP hosted by the “APS Topical Group on Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants (GPMFC). This year’s workshop focus was on “Precision Quantum Sensing.” Graham works with professor Reina Maruyama on the Rydberg Atoms at Yale (RAY) experiment. The poster was entitled “Searching for Dark Matter via Single-Photon Detection using 39K Rydberg Atoms”.
Undergraduate Physics (Intensive) and Humanities double major Lizzie Seward (YC’27) presented a poster co-authored by Craig C. Price(BAE Systems, Inc.) on “Optimized operating parameters for modulation transfer spectroscopy as a laser-locking mechanism” as part of the GPMFC Poster Prize Competition.
The GPMFC Poster Prize is an annual award presented by the Group for Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants (GPMFC) at the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting. It recognizes the best student poster in the field of precision measurement and fundamental constants.
See more photos in the department’s 2026 APS DAMOP Meeting Flickr album.