Tuesday, 19 November 2024 at Noon | 490 Cory Hall
Watch the seminar recording here.
Professor Shimon Kolkowitz
Physics | University of California, Berkeley
Host: Jon Candelaria
ABSTRACT
In this talk, Professor Kolkowitz will explain the basic concepts underlying atomic clocks and how they work and how the ultra-precise optical atomic clocks in his lab work. He will also discuss modern applications of atomic clocks, including the GPS network and unit definitions, as well as emerging applications of optical atomic clocks to searches for new physics, gravitational wave detection, and the mapping of the Earth’s gravity using relativistic time dilation. Finally, he will give an overview of the experiments we are doing in his lab to use these clocks to test relativity.
BIO
Shimon Kolkowitz is an experimental atomic physicist and quantum scientist, with his research focusing on precision measurement, quantum sensing, and metrology. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics. He earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard in 2015, where his research focused on quantum sensing with defects in diamond. He was subsequently a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at JILA/NIST/CU Boulder from 2015-2017, working on metrology and quantum science with optical lattice atomic clocks. From 2018 to 2023 he held a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2023, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Physics and holder of the Herst Chair. He is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including the Packard Science and Engineering Fellowship (2019), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2022), and the National Science Foundation CAREER award.
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