Welcome!
Covey Lab at the University of Illinois
We are a new group at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center. Our initial efforts will focus on arrays of neutral alkaline-earth(-like) atoms in optical tweezers, and we are interested in a wide range of topics from fundamental physics to metrology to device engineering. We are specifically interested in addressing the followings questions:
Can we incorporate quantum communication techniques with Rydberg atom array quantum computers such that they can be linked into a quantum network?
Can we approach metrology from a quantum information science perspective, and will this approach allow us to improve the performance of atomic optical clocks?
Can the rich level structure of alkaline earth atoms with non-zero nuclear spin be utilized for programmable "openness" and controlled dissipation in quantum many-body systems?
News
April 2024 - Student award season!
Will Huie receives the Charles P. Slichter Graduate Fellowship from the Department! Congrats, Will!
Asmi Mauskar receives the Philip J. and Betty M. Anthony Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship from the Department! Congrats, Asmi!
Dominick Cappetta receives the Paul Jursinic Engineering Physics Scholarship! This will support his summer research with the group. Congrats, Dominick!
Healey Kogan receives the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congrats, Healey!
February 2024 - The Covey Lab receives the NSF CAREER Award! See here for more information. This award will support YbI and YbII. Thank you, NSF!
November 2023 - Aakash receives the University Fellowship from the Physics Department for outstanding research accomplishments as a graduate student. Congrats, Aakash!
August 2023 - Healey Kogan is selected to participate in The Grainger College of Engineering Illinois Scholars Undergraduate Research (ISUR) Program. Congrats, Healey!
June 2023 - New results from the K tweezer collaboration with Bryce Gadway's group on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms in synthetic dimensions have just been posted! Congrats to the team!
May 2023 - Our first experimental results, about repetitive readout and real-time control of Yb-171 nuclear spin qubits, have been posted! Congrats to the team!
April/May 2023 - Student award season!
Simon Hu receives the Donald & Shirley Jones Graduate Research Fellowship from the Department! Congrats, Simon!
Healey Kogan receives the Laura B. Eisenstein Award from the Department! She also received the Fulbright scholarship for a research program this summer! Congrats, Healey!
Abhishek Karve received the John A. Gardner Undergraduate Research Award from the Department! This will support his summer research with the group. Congrats, Abhishek!
August 2022 - We posted a new paper on a novel approach to removing high-frequency noise on ultrastable lasers via active feedforward! Update (Sept.): This paper has been accepted to Physical Review Applied!
April/May 2022 - Student award season!
Neville Chen receives the Scott Anderson Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award from the Department! Congrats, Neville!
Yaashnaa Singhal and Nathan Zachar receive undergraduate research awards from the Department! Yaashnaa received the Lorella M. Jones research award, and Nathan received the Philip J. and Betty M. Anthony research award! Congrats, Yaashnaa and Nathan!
Healey Kogan receives the Open Quantum Initiative (OQI) Undergraduate Fellowship from the Chicago Quantum Exchange! This will support her summer research with the group. Congrats, Healey!
Abhishek Karve and Michael Norlander receive the IBM/UIUC Undergraduate research award! This will support their summer research with the group and with IBM. Congrats, Abhishek and Michael!
March 2022 - An Yb-171 atom in an optical tweezer at the clock-magic wavelength of 760 nm! This comes 16 months after gaining access to lab space, and despite the pandemic and broken supply chain. In fact, this is only a single tweezer for now just because our trap laser has been nearly dead for many months, with the supply chain issues (allegedly) to blame for the slow replacement timeframe. Also, this work is already approaching uncharted territory: only limited data exists for the 1S0-3P1 differential polarizability for this isotope at this wavelength.
In any case, we will have an array soon!
Congrats to the team for reaching this milestone rather quickly despite the extra challenges!
January 2022 - We posted a new paper on the omg architecture for ytterbium-171 nuclear spins in a collaboration with Chris Greene at Purdue!
November 2021 - Will Huie is awarded the distinguished 2021 University Fellowship for excellence in research! Congrats, Will!
November 2021 - Both of our recent arXiv preprints (see below) have been accepted to Physical Review Research! Congrats, teams!
September 2021 - We are starting a new NSF research program with experimentalists here at UIUC, and Liang Jiang at UChicago, to investigate Interconnects for a Superconducting-Atomic Hybrid Quantum Network!
August 2021 - Our first paper from a collaboration with a new experiment in Bryce Gadway's group, also at UIUC, is posted to the arXiv! We aim to employ a potassium tweezer array to probe dipolar Rydberg dynamics and synthetic dimensions!
July 2021 - Our group's first paper, in collaboration with Hannes Bernien at UChicago, is posted to the arXiv! A proposal for multiplexed telecom-band quantum networking with atom arrays in optical cavities.
July 2021 - Our first single-PI grant is starting next month! Thank you, NSF!
June 2021 - 3D MOT of nearly 100 million atoms in the science cell. The atomic beam comes from the 2D MOT in the source cell, so there were many steps required for this result! We anticipate being able to load a green 3D MOT directly, but we decided to try this first!
May 2021 - Ian Vetter receives the prestigious Philip J. and Betty M. Anthony Undergraduate Summer Research Award to support his work in our group over the summer! Congrats, Ian!
April 2021 - Welcome ytterbium, our newest and most important group member!
March 2021 - New Endres group paper on randomness from chaos as a tool for quantum science: "Emergent Randomness and Benchmarking from Many-Body Quantum Chaos" ! Update (Sept. 2022): This paper has (finally) been accepted to Nature!
February 2021 - Two undergraduate students join our group for S21. Welcome Michael and Ian!
November 2020 - After the completion of "fast and minor" electrical and plumbing projects, we finally gain access to our (temporary) lab space on November 9th! (See below.) Two weeks later we have performed a few laser installs, are building optical circuit layouts, and are preparing the vacuum system for assembly. See the Gallery for details.
October 2020 - A new postdoc will join our group in March! We look forward to working with Lintao Li, coming from Dajun Wang's group at the Chinese University of Hong Kong! Dajun's group is well known for work with bosonic quantum gas mixtures and ultracold polar molecules.
September 2020 - A new postdoc will join our group in January! We look forward to working with Saeed Pegahan, coming from John Thomas' group at North Carolina State University! John's group is well known for degenerate Fermi gases of ultracold atoms.
August 2020 - We are ready to begin building in the newly-renovated IQUIST testbed lab space, and equipment is starting to arrive! Stay tuned for updates!
June 2020 - Will Huie joins the group as an incoming PhD student. Welcome Will!
May 2020 - Jake accepts the offer from the University of Illinois and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, and the Covey Lab is officially underway!
March 2020 - Jake spends time working in Oskar Painter's group learning about dilution refrigerators and superconducting quantum circuits. Although his involvement was cut short by the lab shutdowns due to covid-19, he helped install a new dilution refrigerator, and contributed to ongoing efforts towards many-body quantum simulation with superconducting metamaterials.
January 2020 - We have engineered high-fidelity control, read-out, and entanglement of alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms! We have surpassed the state of the art in terms of Rydberg coherence, and a natural next step is to use Rydberg states to engineer interactions between optical 'clock' qubits for the first time.
August 2019 - We have demonstrated an atomic array optical clock with single-atom readout. This platform allows for low dead times as well as atom-resolved systematic shifts (left). Further, we are engineering Rydberg interactions between optical 'clock' qubits for the first time, and we are already reaching the state of the art in terms of Rydberg coherence.
November 2018 - A 2000-frame video of single atoms held in an one-dimensional array of 25 tweezers with ~50% filling fraction (right). The lifetime of atoms is more than three minutes while "filming" this video. Atom loss happens suddenly from one frame to the next, and they do not reappear. The tweezers are at the magic wavelength for optical clock operation, and this capability allows for continuous measurement of a tweezer-based optical clock. See here for the paper, and the video is under Supplementary Material.
October 2018 - Alkaline-earth atoms in large two-dimensional tweezer arrays can be used to engineer many-body states via strong interactions between highly-excited Rydberg states. This image (left) shows atomic fluorescence averaged over many realizations.