Alumni

 Matthew PhillipsGordon M. Shepherd HRL LaboratoriesSensory Processing in the Olfactory Bulb: From Lateral Inhibition to BehaviorSensory perception is the fundamental process by which all organisms gain knowledge of their world. Perceptions arise from stimulations of sensory receptors that are translated into neuronal signals. These signals become processed and refined greatly before reaching conscious awareness in higher brain areas. Understanding the mechanisms and functions of this processing is a significant and major challenge for science. The use of model systems, such as the mammalian olfactory system, is helpful... more Hasuk Francis SongKaryn Le Hur Research ScientistDeepMindEntanglement in Quantum Many-Body SystemsThe scaling of entanglement entropy and, more recently, the full entanglement spectrum have become useful tools for characterizing certain universal features of quantum many-body systems. We motivate the importance of entanglement in the study of many-body systems by considering the “gratuitously big” size of Hilbert space and the need for generic ansatzes that efficiently represent useful wave functions. In addition, we study the scaling of the entanglement entropy in the two-... more
 Hanghui ChenSohrab Ismail-Beigi Postdoctoral AssociateColumbia UniversityA first principles study of oxide interfacesBoth theoretically and experimentally, enormous progress has been made toward understanding and controlling materials at the atomic scales. The advances in thin film deposition techniques make it possible to grow artificially designed heterostructures that do not exist in nature. The theoretical developments of ab initio calculations combined with the rapid increase of computational capability enable scientists to analyse data, make predictions and even design experiments from numerical... more Andrew JayichJack Harris Postdoctoral AssociateCaltechLaser cooling a 261 kHz harmonic oscillatorOptomechanics is a diverse field where mechanical harmonic oscillators are coupled to an optical field via radiation pressure. The mechanical devices range from atom clouds and nanotubes up to the kilogram scale mirrors used in the LIGO observatories. The starting point for many interesting measurements begins with the mechanical device in its ground state, where it has less than a phonon worth of energy. In Jack Harris's lab we are working to cool a mechanical membrane to its ground state... more Benjamin KaplanPaul L. Tipton Postdoctoral AssociateNYUTesting the Standard Model of Particle Physics: A Search for New Phenomena in Multilepton Events with the ATLAS detector at the LHCAn excess of events over the Standard Model predictions in final states with three or more high momentum charged leptons would constitute evidence of new physical processes. Presented is a generic search for new phenomena in such events. To reduce the largest Standard Model backgrounds, events consistent with the production of a Z boson are rejected. Events are selected from 1.02 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV. There is no... more Sarah LockwitzPaul Tipton Postdoctoral AssociateFermi LabA Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson in CDF II DataThis dissertation presents a search for the standard model Higgs boson in the associated production process proton anti-proton to ZH to electron positron b quark anti-b quark. Data amounting to an integrated luminosity of 7.5/fb at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV collected at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) at the Tevatron are analyzed. Two objectives are pursued in the methods applied: maximize acceptance, and distinguish the signal from background. The first aim is met by applying... more Vladimir ManucharyanMichel Devoret Postdoctoral AssociateHarvardSuperinductance: a New Element for Quantum CircuitsWe harness the phenomenon of kinetic inductance of a superconductor for the purposes of quantum information processing with superconducting circuits. In the present work, kinetic inductance of an array of Josephson tunnel junctions with carefully chosen parameters exceeds its geometric (magnetic) inductance by four orders of magnitude. Using such inductance, one can construct electrical circuits, in which quantum electrodynamics of charges and fluxes is governed by an effective fine structure... more Carl SchreckCorey O'Hern Assoc Mech Eng & Materials SciYale UniversityMechanical and vibrational properties of model granular mediaThis thesis describes comprehensive computational and theoretical studies of the mechanical and vibrational properties of athermal particulate systems, such as granular media, foams, and emulsions, modeled as frictionless particles with spherical or ellipsoidal shapes. First, we investigate the mechanical properties of static packings of ellipsoidal particles. While amorphous packings of spherical particles are isostatic at jamming onset and possess the minimum contact number $z=z_{\rm iso}$... more Benjamin ZwicklJack Harris Assistant Professor of PhysicsRochester Institute of TechnologyProgress Toward Observation of Radiation Pressure Shot NoiseAbstract: It has been over 100 years since the first conclusive demonstration of radiation pressure by Lebedev and Nichols and Hull. Cavity optomechanical systems---high finesse optical cavities coupled to mechanical resonators---are good testing grounds for the mechanical properties of light. The system described in this dissertation is a 7 mm long cavity coupled to a 1 mm square, 50 nm thick silicon nitride membrane. Like many similar optomechanical systems, ranging from LIGO to microtoroids... more
 Rona RamosSean Barrett Graduate Program CoordinatorYale UniversityNovel Pulse Sequences Exploiting the Effects of Hard π-pulsesIn magnetic resonance and other spectroscopies, the strong pulses used to control coherent spin evolution are often approximated as instantaneous delta function rotations. However, small corrections to the delta function model can cause surprising departures from the conventional theory in standard multipulse NMR experiments using strong π-pulses. In this dissertation, we report the exploration of the small correction terms resulting from the finite duration of realistic pulses, however strong... more
 Ke HanJack Sandweiss Search for Stable Strange Quark Matter in Lunar SoilStrange Quark Matter (SQM) is a proposed state of hadronic matter made up of roughly one-third each of up, down, and strange quarks in a single hadronic bag. For the last three decades, a wide range of experimental searches for strangelets (small lumps of SQM with baryon number less than 106) have been conducted but all failed to give a definite answer to the existence of SQM. We report results from a search for strangelets in a lunar soil sample, in which the predicted strangelet concentration... more
 Yong JiangDavid DeMille Research Scientist in PhysicsYale UniversityWebsiteProgress Towards Searching for Electron Electric Dipole Moment Using PbOObservation of a non-zero electron electric dipole moment (EDM) will be explicit evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. There is significant interest in developing experiments that can probe beyond the current limits for the electron EDM. An experiment to look for the EDM of the electron using the metastable a(1) [3Σ+] state of the PbO molecule has been implemented at Yale University. We populate the a(1) [3Σ+] state of 208PbO using laser-microwave double resonance, and we... more
 Charles BaltayHorace Dwight Taft Eugene Higgins Professor of PhysicsYale UniversityWebsiteA study of antiperon production in antiperon-proton reactions