News from The Simon Lab at Stanford University
Ph.D. 3/9/2026
Congratulations to Dr. Lukas Palm on successfully defending his thesis today!
Congratulations 3/9/2026
Congratulations to Lukas, Bowen, Cady, and Marius on their paper Enhanced Rydberg Blockade through RF-tuned Förster Resonance, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 2/8/2026
Congratulations to Anna, Danial, Adam, and Lukas on their paper Stability, degeneracy, and scalability of a 600-site cavity array microscope, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 2/8/2026
Congratulations to Andrei and Gabrielle on their paper Quantum-controlled synthetic materials, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 1/14/2026
Congratulations to Xin Wei, Zeyang Li, Abhishek Karve and Adam Shaw on their paper A 10 MHz Spatial Light Modulator, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 10/19/2025
Congratulations to Zeyang Li, Abhishek Karve, and Xin Wei on their paper A Second-Order Optical Butterworth Fabry-Pérot Filter, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 6/12/2025
Congratulations to Adam Shaw, Anna Soper, Danial Shadmany, Ash Kumar, Lukas Palm, Da-Yeon Koh, Vassilios Kaxiras, Lavanya Taneja, and Matt Jaffe for their paper A cavity array microscope for parallel single-atom interfacing, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 6/5/2025
Congratulations to Adam Shaw on winning the Theodor W. Hansch Prize in Quantum Optics from Optica
Congratulations 3/3/2025
Congratulations to Lavanya for her paper Light-controlled strong coupling of optical cavity modes spaced by 200 THz, posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 2/26/2025
Congratulations to Bowen, Cady, Lukas and Marius on their paper A MEGA-FPS low light camera, posted to the arXiv today.
Welcome 9/23/2024
Welcome to Da-Yeon Koh and Abhishek Karve, who joined the group this week. Da-Yeon will join the cavity array team, while Abhishek will join the hybrid quantum science team.
Ph.D. 8/7/2024
Congratulations to Dr. Chuan Yin on successfully defending her doctoral thesis!
Congratulations 7/10/2024
Congratulations to Aziza on accepting a faculty position at Berkeley!
Congratulations 7/7/2024
Congratulations to Danial, Ash, Anna, Lukas, Chuan, Henry, Bowen, Lavanya and Matt Jaffe on their paper Cavity QED in a High NA Resonator posted to the arXiv today.
Welcome 7/1/2024
Welcome to Cady Feng, who is joining the topological cavity QED experiment after undergraduate research with Jeff Thompson @ Princeton.
Ph.D. 11/3/2023
Congratulations to Dr. Margaret Panetta on successfully defending her thesis.
Ph.D. 10/27/2023
Congratulations to Dr. Gabrielle Roberts on successfully defending her thesis.
Congratulations 9/13/2023
Congratulations to Gabrielle Roberts, Andrei Vrajitoarea, Meg Panetta and Brendan Saxberg on their paper Manybody Interferometry of Quantum Fluids, posted today to the arXiv.
Thesis Award 6/7/2023
Congratulations to Aziza Suleymanzade on receiving the 2023 Deborah Jin Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award from the American Physical Society.
Fellowship 5/23/2023
Congratulations to Anna Soper on receipt of a 2023 Hertz Fellowship.
Congratulations 5/22/2023
Congratulations to Andrei Vrajitoarea on accepting a faculty position in physics at New York University.
Congratulations 5/22/2023
Congratulations to Ash Kumar on accepting a faculty position in physics at Stony Brook University.
NDSEG Fellowship 4/16/2023
Congratulations to Anna Soper on receiving NSF and NDSEG graduate research fellowships.
3/23/2023
Atomic mmWave-to-Optical transduction paper out today in Nature here.
2/19/2023
Contratulations to Aziza Suleymanzade on her selection as a Deborah Jin Thesis Prize finalist. Learn about her award-winning research at DAMOP 2023!
Congratulations 1/31/2023
Congratulations to Chuan Yin, Henry Ando, Mark Stone, Danial Shadmany, Anna Soper, Matt Jaffe, and Ash Kumar on their paper A Cavity Load Lock Apparatus for Next-Generation Quantum Optics Experiments, posted to the arXiv today.
Paper Published 12/15/2022
Congratulations to Brendan Saxberg, Andrei Vrajitoarea, Gabrielle Roberts and Margaret G. Panetta on their paper Disorder-assisted assembly of strongly correlated fluids of light, published in Nature.
Congratulations 10/16/2022
Congratulations to Dr. Brendan Saxberg on the successful defense of his thesis.
Congratulations 09/24/2022
Congratulations to Dr. Claire Baum on the successful defense of her thesis!
Congratulations 08/09/2022
Congratulations to Claire Baum, Matt Jaffe, Lukas Palm, and Ash Kumar on their paper Optical mode conversion via spatiotemporally modulated atomic susceptibility, posted to the arXiv.
Congratulations 07/21/2022
Congratulations to Ash Kumar, Aziza Suleymanzade, Mark Stone and Lavanya Taneja on their paper Quantum-limited millimeter wave to optical transduction, posted to the arXiv.
Congratulations 07/05/2022
Congratulations to Brendan Saxberg, Andrei Vrajitoarea, Gabrielle Roberts and Meg Panetta on their paper Disorder-Assisted Assembly of Strongly Correlated Fluids of Light
Congratulations 05/31/2022
Congratulations to Nathan Schine on accepting a faculty position @ JQI.
Congratulations 05/12/2022
Congratulations to Matt Jaffe, Lukas Palm, Claire Baum, Lavanya Taneja and Aishwarya Kumar on their paper Understanding and suppressing backscatter in optical resonators
12/10/2021
The group will be moving to Stanford in 2022!
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.
Congratulations 5/11/2021
Congratulations 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!
Paper Published 12/17/2020
Congratulations to Mark Stone, Aziza Suleymanzade and Lavanya Taneja on their paper "Optical mode conversion in coupled Fabry–Perot resonators" published today in Optics Letters.
10/31/2020
A cool piece in Physics World by Lavanya Taneja about undoing the scrambling induced by passing through a multimode fiber.
7/5/2020
Looking for a weekly AMO seminar covering the latest developments in the community! Check out the Virtual AMO Seminar, now streamed weekly on Zoom or Youtube, and archived on Youtube.
Welcome 6/15/2020
Welcome back to lab, everyone- the campus is beginning to reopen and experimental quantum science is back in business!
Congratulations 6/4/2020
Congratulations to Claire Baum, recipient of the 2020 Chair's Students Award for Distinguished Service.
Congratulations 6/4/2020
Congratulations to Jasmine Kalia, recipient of the 2020 UChicago Lewis Prize.
Congratulations 6/3/2020
Congratulations to Logan, Nathan, Claire, and Logan on the publication of their paper Observation of Laughlin states made of light in Nature, with an accompanying News and Views.
Congratulations 5/26/2020
Congratulations to Mark Stone, Aziza Suleymanzade, and Lavanya Taneja on their paper Optical mode conversion in coupled Fabry-Pérot resonators , posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 5/1/2020
Congratulations to Dr.'s Matt Jaffe and Nathan Schine, both selected as finalists for the American Physical Society Deborah S. Jin thesis prize in atomic physics! Watch their amazing talks at the 2020 virtual DAMOP conference on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2-4PM PDT (Details).
Welcome 3/13/2020
A warm welcome to all of the prospective graduate students participating in our virtual open house!
3/2/2020
A fun Nature Physics review article on recent advances in matter made of microwave photons here .
Welcome 1/5/2020
Please welcome Dr.'s Matt Jaffe and Ash Kumar, who have joined the group as postdoctoral scholars.
1/1/2020
Happy New Year! Dr. Nathan Schine taught his tesla coil to play Auld Lang Syne-- check it out here!
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.
Congratulations 5/24/2019
Congrats to Ruichao Ma, who has just accepted a faculty position in physics at Purdue University; his website is here. He will be missed!
Welcome 3/2/2019
Welcome to all of the visitors @ the UofC Physics Open House.
Paper Published 2/6/2019
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma, Brendan Saxberg, Clai Owens, Nelson Leung and Yao Lu for their paper A Dissipatively Stabilized Mott Insulator of Photons published in Nature, and featured in a News and Views piece.
Paper Published 1/9/2019
Congratulations to Nathan Schine and Michelle Chalupnik for their paper Measuring Electromagnetic and Gravitational Responses of Photonic Landau Levels published in Nature and featured in Physics World.
In the news... 1/4/2019
Congratulations to Leon Lu, Ningyuan Jia, and Lin Su for their paper Probing the Berry Curvature and Fermi Arcs of a Weyl Circuit, featured on the front page of PRB as an editor's suggestion.
Welcome 10/9/2018
Welcome to Lavanya Taneja and Chuan Yin, new graduate researchers in the group!
Congratulations 9/6/2018
Congratulations to Alex Georgakopoulos and Ariel Sommer, for the acceptance of their paper Theory of Interacting Cavity Rydberg Polaritons in IOP/QST.
Congratulations 8/20/2018
Congratulations to Dr. Alexandros Georgakopoulos on the successful defense of his thesis!
Congratulations 7/30/2018
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma, Brendan Saxberg, Clai Owens, Nelson Leung and Yao Lu for their paper A Dissipatively Stabilized Mott Insulator of Photons posted to the arXiv today.
Congratulations 7/24/2018
Congratulations to Dr. Jia Ningyuan on the successful defense of his thesis!
Congratulations 7/16/2018
Congratulations to Leon Lu, Ningyuan Jia, Lin Su and Clai Owens for their paper Probing the Berry Curvature and Fermi Arcs of a Weyl Circuit posted to the arXiv today!
Congratulations 6/28/2018
Congratulations to Logan Clark, Ningyuan Jia, Nathan Schine, Claire Baum, and Alexandros Georgakopoulos on their paper Interacting Floquet Polaritons posted to the arXiv today!
Congratulations 5/20/2018
Congratulations to Alexandros Georgakopoulos and Ariel Sommer on their paper Theory of Interacting Cavity Rydberg Polaritons posted to the arXiv today!
Fellowship 5/11/2018
Congratulations to Nathan Schine on receiving the 2018 Grainger Fellowship.
Fellowship 4/3/2018
Congratulations to Claire Baum on receiving a 2018 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Paper Published 3/19/2018
Congratulations to Albert Ryou, Alexandros Georgakopoulos, Ariel Sommer, Logan Clark, Nathan Schine and Ningyuan Jia for their paper A Strongly Interacting Polaritonic Quantum Dot published today in Nature Physics.
Congratulations 2/13/2018
Congratulations to Nathan Schine and Michelle Chalupnik for their paper "Measuring Electromagnetic and Gravitational Responses of Photonic Landau Levels" posted on the arXiv.
2/13/2018
A Review Article on Topological Photonics posted to the arXiv.
In the news... 1/3/2018
Congratulations to Jia Ningyuan, Nathan Schine, Albert Ryou, Alex, and Ariel Sommer for the publication of their paper "Photons and polaritons in a broken-time-reversal nonplanar resonator" , just published in PRA, with an APS physics focus "Physics Focus" , featured on the front page and in "Nature Photonics" .
Ph.D 10/9/2017
Welcome to Logan Clark, who has joined the group as a postdoc; congrats on your successful thesis defense!
10/2/2017
A fun story about Jon in OZY.
Congratulations 9/3/2017
Congratulations to Jia Ningyuan, Nathan Schine, Alexandros Georgakopoulos, and Albert Ryou on their paper "Photons and polaritons in a time-reversal-broken non-planar resonator", submitted to the arXiv.
Congratulations 7/9/2017
Congratulations to Clai Owens, Aman LaChapelle, Brendan Saxberg and Ruichao Ma on their paper "Quarter-Flux Hofstadter Lattice in Qubit-Compatible Microwave Cavity Array", submitted to the arXiv.
Ph.D. 6/23/2017
Congratulations to Dr. Albert Ryou on successfully defending his thesis.
Welcome 6/12/2017
Welcome to Claire Baum, who has joined our group as a graduate student.
Congratulations 5/23/2017
Congratulations to Jia Ningyuan, Nathan Schine, Alex, Albert Ryou and Ariel Sommer for their new paper "A Strongly Interacting Polaritonic Quantum Dot" submitted to the arXiv.
Paper Published 3/17/2017
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma and Clai Owens for their paper "An Autonomous Stabilizer for Incompressible Photon Fluids and Solids" published in PRA.
Fellowship 3/17/2017
Congratulations to Mark Stone for receiving the NSF Graduate Research fellowship.
Welcome 3/3/2017
Welcome to all of the visitors to the SimonLab during the Physics and IME prospective graduate student open houses
2/8/2017
The Simonlab Mannequin Challenge Video is now available for your consumption! Experience a day in the life of a quantum optometrist: Simonlab Mannequin Challenge
Congratulations 1/20/2017
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma and Clai Owens for their paper "An Autonomous Stabilizer for Incompressible Photon Fluids and Solids" submitted to the arXiv.
Paper Published 1/7/2017
Congratulations to Albert Ryou for his paper "Active cancellation of acoustical resonances with an FPGA FIR filter" published in Review of Scientific Instruments.
Paper Published 12/1/2016
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma, and Clai Owens for the paper "Engineering Topological Many-Body Materials in Microwave Cavity Arrays" published in Physical Review X .
Welcome 11/29/2016
Welcome to Evan Mata, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 10/4/2016
Welcome to Joshua Wakefield, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 9/30/2016
Welcome to Yuehui Lu (Leon), who has joined the group an exchange student from Peking University.
Welcome 9/1/2016
Welcome to Brendan Saxberg, who has joined the group as a graduate researcher.
Paper Published 7/18/2016
Congratulations to Ruichao Ma, Clai Owens, and Aman LaChapelle for the paper "Hamiltonian tomography of photonic lattices" published on the arXiv.
Press Coverage 7/18/2016
The paper by Nathan Schine, Albert Ryou, and Ariel Sommer about synthetic Landau Levels for photons was covered in Physics today.
Paper Published 6/30/2016
Congratulations to Nathan Schine, Albert Ryou and Ariel Sommer for their paper "Synthetic Landau levels for photons" published in Nature.
Congratulations 6/2/2016
Congratulations to Albert Ryou for receiving the Winstein Prize in Instrumentation.
PECASE Award 5/5/2016
Jonathan Simon was honored at the White House PECASE Award Ceremony.
Paper Published 4/13/2016
Congratulations to Jia Ningyuan, Alexandros Georgakopoulos, Albert Ryou, and Ariel Sommer for their paper "Observation and characterization of cavity Rydberg polaritons" which was just published in Physical Review A.
Paper Published 3/7/2016
Congratulations to Ariel Sommer for the paper "Engineering photonic Floquet Hamiltonians through Fabry-Perot resonators" which was just published in the New Journal of Physics
Welcome 11/1/2015
Welcome to Scott Eustice, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 9/1/2015
Welcome to Mark Stone, who has joined the group as a graduate researcher.
Welcome 8/27/2015
Welcome to Michelle Chalupnik, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 8/1/2015
Welcome to Dr. Ruichao Ma, who will work jointly between our group and the Schuster Lab as a Postdoctoral Research.
Welcome 7/1/2015
Welcome to Freddy Cisneros, who has joined us as a summer researcher.
Paper Published 6/22/2015
Congratulations to Ningyuan Jia, Clai Owens, and Ariel Sommer for the paper "Time- and site-resolved dynamics in a topological circuit" published in Physical Review X .
Paper Published 5/1/2015
Congratulations to Ariel Sommer for the paper "Quantum Crystals and Laughlin Droplets of Cavity Rydberg Polaritons" published on the arXiv.
Welcome 3/30/2015
Welcome to Jeremy Estes, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 2/20/2015
Welcome to Aman LaChapelle, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 10/22/2014
Welcome to Michael Cervia, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 10/1/2014
Welcome to Tahoe Schrader, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 9/1/2014
Welcome to Aziza Suleymanzade and Nathan Schine who have joined the group as graduate researchers.
Fellowship 4/10/2014
Congratulations to Clai Owens for receiving the NSF Graduate Research fellowship.
NDSEG Fellowship 4/10/2014
Congratulations to Albert Ryou for receiving the NDSEG fellowship.
Welcome 2/5/2014
Welcome to Sohini Upadhyay, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 11/19/2013
Welcome to JinWoo Sung, who has joined the group as an undergraduate researcher.
Welcome 10/1/2013
Welcome to Clai Owens, who has joined the group as a graduate researcher.
Welcome 9/1/2013
Welcome to Jia Ningyuan, who has joined the group as a graduate researcher -- Jia was a visiting researcher with us last year!
Welcome 4/1/2013
Welcome to Dr. Ariel Sommer, who has joined the group as a Grainger Postdoctoral Fellow.
Welcome 4/1/2013
Welcome to Dr. Ariel Sommer, who has joined the group as a Grainger Postdoctoral Fellow.
Welcome 12/1/2012
Welcome to Lindsay Bassman, who has joined the group as a master's researcher.
Welcome 12/1/2012
Welcome to Graham Greve, Aaron Krahn and Jeremy Seeman, who have joined the group as undergraduate researchers.
Welcome 9/1/2012
Welcome to Alexandros Georgakopoulos and Albert Ryou, the first two graduate students to join the group!