Benjamin Lev
Assistant Professor of Physics
Professor Benjamin Lev received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University in 1999, graduating magna cum laude. He earned a Ph.D. from Caltech in 2005, working in the quantum optics group of Hideo Mabuchi. His thesis research involved the development of novel atom chip techniques for the tight confinement and manipulation ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates. Major projects included the study and realization of novel atom optical devices---such as 1-D ring traps and atom mirrors made from common hard drives---and the development of systems for atom chip-based cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED). These atom-cavity chips are capable of providing robust and scalable architectures for quantum information processing and quantum communication networks. He won the Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lectureship in 2004, and his public lecture on the atom chip may be viewed here.
As a National Research Council postdoctoral research fellow (2006-2007), Professor Lev worked with Jun Ye at JILA (Boulder) on the Stark deceleration of polar molecules. His work focused on the magnetic trapping of ground state polar molecules in the presence of tunable electric fields, which he and his JILA colleagues demonstrated for the first time in 2006. This technique will enable the study of dipole-dipole collisions and is a crucial step towards cooling the trapped polar molecules to the ultracold regime. In addition, Lev conducted a theoretical study of the feasibility of laser cooling molecules to using cavity QED effects, and performed precision spectroscopy on the OH molecule’s ground state. This latter study provided a tenfold improvement on astrophysical constraints of fundamental constant variation as well as uncovered candidate molecular qubits for use in molecular quantum computing architectures.
Professor Lev joins the Department of Physics at Illinois in January 2008.
Research Area: Experimental ultracold atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics, and quantum information science.
research direction
At the frontier of AMO physics is the possibility to create and control ultracold dipolar gases. The strong, long-range and anisotropic dipole-dipole interaction adds an entirely new feature to ultracold physics, and may be harnessed to explore collective and collisional phenomena that emerge when the dipole-dipole interaction dominates kinetic energy. From the perspective of quantum information processing and spin lattice simulations, this interaction is ideal for constructing the nearest-neighbor interactions crucial for realizing robust and scaleable experimental architectures. Moreover, large permanent dipoles provide strong interactions with external fields, dramatically increasing the ability to explore quantum phenomena using techniques co-opted from atom optics and cavity QED.
To pursue these goals, Lev’s initial research will focus on developing novel laser cooling and trapping techniques to create ultracold samples of ground state polar molecules and highly magnetic atoms. These ultracold gases will be loaded onto micro- and nanofabricated devices tailored to provide quantum laboratories-on-a-chip.
Prospective graduate students and postdocs are welcome to contact me at benlev@illinois.edu.
Selected Publications
B. Lev, A. Vukics, E. Hudson, B. Sawyer, P. Domokos, H. Ritsch, J. Ye, "Prospects for the cavity-assisted laser cooling of molecules," Phys. Rev. A 77, 023402 (2008); quant-ph/0705.3639.
B. Sawyer, B. Lev, E Hudson, B. Stuhl, M. Lara, J. Bohn, J. Ye, "Magneto-electrostatic trapping of ground state OH molecules," Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 253002 (2007).
B. Lev, E. Meyer, E. Hudson, B. Sawyer, J. Bohn, and J. Ye, "OH hyperfine ground state: from precision measurement to molecular qubits," Phys. Rev. A (Rapid Communications) 74, 061402(R) (2006).
P.E. Barclay, B. Lev, K. Srinivasan, O. Painter, and H. Mabuchi, "Integration of Fiber Coupled High-Q Silicon Nitride Microdisks with Magnetostatic Atom Chips," Appl. Phys. Lett. 89, 131108 (2006); quant-ph/0605234.
B. Lev, K. Srinivasan, P. Barclay, O. Painter, and H. Mabuchi, "Feasibility of Detecting Single Atoms using Photonic Bandgap Cavities," Nanotechnology 15, S556 (2004); quant-ph/0402093.
A. Hopkins, B. Lev, H. Mabuchi, "Proposed Magneto-Electrostatic Ring Trap for Neutral Atoms," Phys. Rev. A 70, 053616 (2004).
B. Lev, Y. Lassailly, C. Lee, A. Scherer, and H. Mabuchi, "Atom Mirror Etched from a Hard Drive," Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 395–397 (2003); quant-ph/03004003.
Honors and Awards
- National Research Council Research Associateship, 2006–2008
- Everhart Distinguished Graduate Student Lectureship, 2004
- Allen Goodrich Schenstone Prize for Outstanding Work in Experimental Physics, Princeton University, 1999