The Simon Lab at The University of Chicago

Our Science...

Vacuum chamber with MOT coils and twisted crossed cavities and electrodes

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

Our home at the James Franck Institute

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

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 11/4/2019

Congratulations to Aziza Suleymanzade, Sasha Anferov, Mark Stone, and Ravi Naik for their new paper A tunable High-Q millimeter wave cavity for hybrid circuit and cavity QED experiments, posted to the arXiv today.

Congratulations 9/4/2019

Congratulations to Aziza Suleymanzade, Sasha Anferov, and Andrew Oriani for their new paper Millimeter-Wave Four-Wave Mixing via Kinetic Inductance for Quantum Devices, posted to the arXiv today.

Congratulations 8/30/2019

Congratulations to Clai Owens and Nathan Schine on the successful defenses of their doctoral theses.

Welcome 8/3/2019

Welcome to Lukas Palm, who has joined the group as a graduate researcher; he joins us from the University of Heidelberg where he worked with Professor Selim Joachim.

Congratulations 7/15/2019

Congratulations to Logan Clark, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, and Ningyuan Jia for their new paper Observation of Laughlin states made of light, posted to the arXiv today.

In the news... 7/3/2019

Congratulations to Logan Clark, Ningyuan Jia, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, and Alexandros Georgakopoulos for their paper Interacting Floquet Polaritons just published in Nature. Here is a press release explaining the science.

More News

Atomic Physics

Cavity Rydberg Polaritons

Topological Photonics in Curved Space

Photonic Materials in Quantum Circuits

Hybrid Quantum Systems

Theory

Aziza Suleymanzade, Alexander Anferov, Mark Stone, Ravi K. Naik, Jonathan Simon, and David Schuster, "A tunable High-Q millimeter wave cavity for hybrid circuit and cavity QED experiments" arXiv:1911.00553, (2019)

A tunable High-Q millimeter wave cavity for hybrid circuit and cavity QED experiments

Alexander Anferov, Aziza Suleymanzade, Andrew Oriani, Jonathan Simon and David Schuster, "Millimeter-Wave Four-Wave Mixing via Kinetic Inductance for Quantum Devices" arXiv:1909.01487, (2019)

Millimeter-Wave Four-Wave Mixing via Kinetic Inductance for Quantum Devices

Logan W Clark, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, Ningyuan Jia and Jonathan Simon, "Observation of Laughlin states made of light" arXiv:1907.05872, (2019)

Logan W Clark, Ningyuan Jia, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, Alexandros Georgakopoulos, Jonathan Simon, "Interacting Floquet Polaritons" Nature 571, 532–536, (2019)

Tomoki Ozawa, Hannah M Price, Alberto Amo, Nathan Goldman, Mohammad Hafezi, Ling Lu, Mikael Rechtsman, David Schuster, Jonathan Simon, Oded Zilberberg, Iacopo Carusotto, "Topological Photonics" Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 015006, (2019)

Ruichao Ma, Brendan Saxberg, Clai Owens, Nelson Leung and Yao Lu, Jonathan Simon and David Schuster, "A Dissipatively Stabilized Mott Insulator of Photons" Nature 566, 51–57, (2019)