Lab Groups

When material dimensions reach the nanometer scale, quantum mechanical and thermodynamic properties that are insignificant in larger, everyday materials dominate, causing these nanomaterials to display new and interesting properties. Our work seeks to understand these properties and exploit them for technological applications.

The Awschalom Group has active research activities in optical and magnetic interactions in semiconductor quantum structures, spin dynamics and coherence in condensed matter systems (“spintronics”), macroscopic quantum phenomena in nanometer-scale magnets, and implementations of quantum information and sensing in the solid state.

The Cleland Lab is developing superconducting, mechanical, and optomechanical structures for applications to quantum information. Applying the tools of advanced lithographic processing to a wide range of materials, they can design and build superconducting qubit circuits with excellent quantum coherence; mechanical devices with operating frequencies in the microwave band; and structures that convert signals between microwave and infrared optical frequencies.

The Clerk Group is broadly interested in a variety of driven-dissipative quantum phenomena occurring in engineered quantum systems. Its research is at the intersection of condensed matter physics, quantum optics, and quantum information. While Clerk Group is composed of theorists, they work closely with a number of leading experimental groups around the world.

The Engel Group strives to exploit femtosecond dynamics to steer and to control excited state reactivity. They use a combination of ultrafast spectroscopy, theory, synthesis, and biophysics to approach this problem.

The Galli Group develops and uses theoretical and computational methods to understand, predict, and engineer material properties from first principles. They investigate solids, liquids, and nanostructures in addition to physical and chemical processes relevant to solar energy conversion, water resources, and quantum information technologies.

The Guha Lab focuses on new materials and systems for information processing and sensing. Current projects are on new oxide-based materials and devices for neuromorphic architectures and non-volatile memory, epitaxial rare earth oxide-based solid-state qubits on silicon platforms for quantum information science, cyberphysical sensor networks and sensor technologies for water and soil, and creating single-crystal films and three-dimensional structures on arbitrary substrates.

The High Lab studies optical and quantum science, exploring new methods to craft nanoscale interactions between light and solid-state systems. By doing so, they can fundamentally modify materials, for instance by breaking time-reversal symmetry or inducing long range coherence, and create deterministic, coherent interactions between single photons and quantum states. Their expertise integrates semiconductor physics, quantum optics, precision fabrication, plasmonics, and integrated photonics.

The Jiang Group investigates quantum control and quantum error correction to protect quantum information from decoherence for various physical platforms, with potential applications for quantum sensing, quantum transduction, quantum communication, and quantum computation.

The Maurer lab focuses on the development and application of novel imaging and sensing modalities which enable the investigation of biological systems that are not accessible by conventional techniques. Through the use of state-of-the-art tools from quantum optics, quantum information technology, and single-molecule biophysics, they develop such novel technologies as a nanoscale quantum sensor for NMR spectroscopy of individual biomolecules, a single-molecule platform for quantum sensing, and the establishment of new nanophotonics techniques for bio-imaging.