The Simon Lab at The University of Chicago

Our Science...

Vacuum chamber with MOT coils and twisted crossed cavities and electrodes

Commissioning the new Load-Lock Cavity QED experiment

Our home at the James Franck Institute

Should Lavanya go in the lake? Some say yes, some say no...

Lasers and frequency offset locks in one of our labs

Electrically Shielded MOT Chamber

Our corner of campus

A look at one of our laser tables

Group picnic!

Vacuum chamber with MOT coils and twisted crossed cavities and electrodes

The Simon Lab explores the interface of condensed matter physics and quantum optics, employing tools from atomic physics, control theory, and state-of-the-art technology developed in-house. We build materials from light, investigate the role of topology in determining material properties, and tackle challenges at the crossroads between strong correlations and quantum coherence.

Making Materials from Light

Matter is typically made of electrons and ions. By developing tools to build materials from photons, we learn about the underpinnings of material properties, and have an opportunity to create matter which previously existed only in the minds of theorists.

Exploring Small Quantum Systems

The laws of quantum mechanics teach us how individual objects behave. When several such objects to interact coherent, the behaviors that emerge are both bizarre and beautiful. We investigate these behaviors with an eye towards material properties, quantum information processing and quantum-secured communication.

A Twisted View of Matter

A new generation of materials has revealed that "hidden", non-local order can have far-reaching implications on material properties. These exotic properties often evade detection in the bulk, and manifest as unidirectional edge states, or even more fascinatingly, appear to bind a giant magnet to each quasi-particle, inducing exotic braiding statistics via Aharanov-Bohm phases.

Congratulations 9/12/2021

Congratulations to Clai Owens, Meg Panetta, Brendan Saxberg, Gabrielle Roberts, Vatsan Chakram, and Ruichao Ma on their paper Chiral Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics, submitted to the arXiv today.

Congratulations 6/22/2021

Congratulations to Dr. Aziza Suleymanzade on the successful defense of her doctoral thesis.

5/11/2021

Congrutulations to Matt Jaffe, Lukas Palm, Claire Baum and Lavanya Taneja for their paper Aberrated optical cavities, submitted to the arXiv today.

Welcome 4/15/2021

A warm welcome to Danial Shadmany, joining the group in fall 2021, and working remotely on classical time-crystals and small-waist resonators in the interim.

Welcome 3/15/2021

A virtual welcome to all of the prospective graduate students participating in the physics and PME open houses! Please feel free to reach out to any of us with questions about the group, the department, the university, or even the city of Chicago! Questions about the world should be directed to the Philosophy department.

01/15/2021

A cool profile of Claire Baum on the PSD website!

More News

Atomic Physics

Cavity Rydberg Polaritons

Topological Photonics in Curved Space

Photonic Materials in Quantum Circuits

Hybrid Quantum Systems

Theory

Clai Owens, Margaret G. Panetta, Brendan Saxberg, Gabrielle Roberts, Srivatsan Chakram, Ruichao Ma, Andrei Vrajitoarea, Jonathan Simon, David Schuster, "Chiral Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics" arXiv: 2109.06033, (2021)

R. O. Umucalılar, Jonathan Simon, Iacopo Carusotto, "Autonomous stabilization of photonic Laughlin states through angular momentum potentials" arXiv: 2105.06751, (2021)

Matt Jaffe, Lukas Palm, Claire Baum, Lavanya Taneja, and Jonathan Simon, "Aberrated optical cavities" Physical Review A 104, 013524, (2021)

Logan W Clark, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, Ningyuan Jia and Jonathan Simon, "Observation of Laughlin states made of light" Nature 582, 41-45, (2020)

Mark Stone, Aziza Suleymanzade, Lavanya Taneja, David Schuster and Jonathan Simon, "Optical mode conversion in coupled Fabry-Pérot resonators" Optics Letters 46, 21-24, (2020)

Iacopo Carusotto, Andrew Houck, Alicia J. Kollár, Pedram Roushan, David Schuster, and Jonathan Simon, "Photonic materials in circuit quantum electrodynamics" Nature Physics 16, 268–279, (2020)