Faculty

ATLAS, Axions, Hidden Sector Photons, Yale Microwave Cavity Experiment (YMCE)

Quadratic Echo Line-Narrowing, Imaging Hard and Soft Solids, Advancing Spectral Reconstruction with Undersampled Data Sets, Custom NMR/MRI Probe Design and Construction

Ultracold atomic physics in optical lattices

Coherent control of light transport and absorption, Random lasers, Spatial coherence engineering of lasers, Speckle-based spectrometers

How networks of neurons perform computations

We are currently running experiments and theory studying how cells and flies sense chemicals and use that information to make decisions during goal oriented tasks such as chemical navigation. We study these processes from molecules to animal behavior.

Metal to insulator transitions, Superconductivity, 2D Magnetism, Solid State Quantum Simulation

Mechanics of Motor Proteins and the Cytoskeleton

Haloscope At Yale Sensitive to Axion CDM (HAYSTAC), Electric dipole moment, Casimir effect

Quantitative analysis of signaling pathways regulating biological phenotype: Signaling Pathway Dynamics, Gradient Sensing, Bacteria-Host Interactions, Differentiation of Stem Cells, Control of Cell Shape & Polarity, Hetertypic Cell Interaction, Networks

Our research focuses on understanding how biological systems operate using approaches from theoretical physics.  We use statistical physics to understand the structure and function of biological membranes, which experiments have shown operate close to a demixing critical point in the Ising universality class.  They also use tools from information theory to place physical bounds on the ability of organisms to function that arise from their limited ability to measure their environment and from their limited energy budget.

Bounds on wave scattering, Computational design, Near-field optical physics, Optimal nanoparticle scatterers, Solar cell design principles

Single Molecule Optical Tweezers Measurement on Nucleosomes, Fast Scanning Random Access STED Microscopy, Protein Degradation in Yeast, The Role of Peripheral Chromatin in Nuclear Mechanics

nEXO, Search for new Interactions in a Microshere Precision Levitation Experiment (SIMPLE)

Theoretical & Computational Cosmology: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Galaxy Clusters, Galaxy Formation & Evolution, Cosmological Simulations, Data Science

Ultracold Quantum Matter

21cm Radio Instrumentation to measure Large Scale Structure and Dark Energy - Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), The Hydrogen Intensity Mapping and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX)

Early Universe Cosmology: The Cosmic Microwave Background - Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Simons Observatory

Soft Matter Research: Quasi-one dimensional models for glassy behavior, the connection between percolation in configuration space and glassy dynamics, statistical mechanics of static and slowly flowing granular media, jamming in systems composed of anisotropic particles and with polymer constraints

Biological Physics Research: Smart, designer, protein-based nanogels; understanding the structural and mechanical properties of epithelial cells, Nanoscale approaches to screening small molecule inhibitors of toxic amyloid species in neurogegenerative disease; protein folding and misfolding

Dynamics of Carbon Nanomaterials, Superconducting Photon Detectors

Exciton Transport & Diffusion; Time-Dependent Phenomena; Heterojunctions, Interfaces and Substrates; Defects

The development of solid-state quantum bits (qubits) for quantum computing, and the advancement of their performance to practical levels

Quantum transduction from microwave to optical photons, Quantum networks and quantum communications, Superconducting quantum detectors

Dynamical Friction, Galaxy Assembly Bias and Galactic Conformity, Precision Cosmology with Galaxies, Statistics of Dark Matter Substructure, Coming of Age in the Dark Sector, Constraining Halo Mass with Satellite Kinematics