Meet Dr. Alec Jenkins

Advisor: Dr. Adam Kaufman

Institution: University of Colorado, Boulder/JILA

Bio:  Alec Jenkins is an IC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Kaufman Lab at JILA and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He earned his Ph.D in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019 and B.A.s in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2013. In the Jayich Lab at UCSB, he worked on the development of a scanning nitrogen-vacancy center magnetometry tool for the high resolution imaging of condensed matter systems. He used this tool to study the structure of magnetic skyrmion systems and the crossover between transport regimes in graphene. In his current research, he is developing Yb optical tweezer arrays aimed at enabling future generations of entanglement-enhanced atomic clocks.

Abstract:  Alkaline earth-like atoms trapped in optical tweezer arrays have recently emerged as a promising platform for future generations of atomic clocks, with extremely long atomic coherence times and high measurement duty cycles. At the same time, tweezer arrays of neutral atoms are being developed for applications in quantum information and many-body simulations, harnessing the individual site preparation and readout afforded by tweezers and high-fidelity interactions possible through excitation to high-lying Rydberg levels. At the intersection of these developments, atomic tweezer arrays have emerged as a platform for improving the stability of optical clocks through entanglement-enhanced metrology. In this research, we aim to generate a programmable array of several hundred neutral atom qubits with high-fidelity preparation, control, and readout. Our goal is to use this instrument to demonstrate applications towards the realization of next generation quantum sensors.