At the beginning of 2020, Dr. Alan Jamison joined the faculty at Waterloo as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Jamison, whose work in the field of experimental atomic physics focuses on ultracold atoms and molecules, is affiliated with Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. At IQC, Jamison will develop a new lab in which to continue his research into ultracold molecules and further the study of quantum chemistry and quantum information.
Jamison grew up in Florida and got his start studying math as an undergraduate at Harvard University. He was initially drawn to Physics because of an interest in particle theory, which he pursued during his first two years of graduate study at the University of Washington.
“I was attracted to particle theory because I was interested in fundamental questions about how the universe works. I came into it with the idea that the tiniest things must be the most important things and so that’s what I wanted to work on.”
But as Jamison continued his studies of Physics, he became more drawn to questions of “what happens when you have a lot of particles instead of just one or two.” As a doctoral student, he found a home in the discipline of atomic physics, where he was excited to work with a small team in a lab on “experiments that take a few people to do rather than experiments that take thousands of people to do.” He discovered that working in the field of atomic physics allowed him to cultivate a broad range of research interests relevant to the larger field of quantum simulation experiments. Jamison worked alongside researchers within the Applied Math department at the University of Washington to develop both theoretical and experimental work on atomic physics. He wrote his doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Subhadeep Gupta, on precision atom interferometry using Bose-Einstein condensates. “It was an experiment that appealed to me a lot because it combined things at the atomic scale...it brought together my interest in what happens when you have a lot of atoms together and my interest in smaller scale particle physics, because what we were precisely measuring was a quantity that is interesting to particle physics,” said Jamison.
After finishing his doctorate, Jamison joined the research group of Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoc. While there, he advised three labs and developed experiments in which he used lasers to cool atoms within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero, making the coldest systems in the known universe. At MIT, Jamison’s research also covered quantum emulation of spin-orbit coupled systems and laser cooling exotic lanthanide atoms. “When I first began working at MIT, I was figuring out how to take a pair of ultracold atoms and stick them together into an ultracold molecule,” said Jamison. “Once you stick two atoms together, they can vibrate or rotate around each other; so there are many more degrees of freedom — a lot more handles by which you can manipulate them. It is exciting because you can simulate a whole new collection of quantum materials or models where the particles interact with each other at long distances.” In another MIT lab, Jamison worked with a group that was able to observe a supersolid, “a very strange thing, like a superfluid that is also a solid at the same time… a substance that is both a solid and can flow without resistance.”
In his new position at Waterloo, Jamison hopes to build on his work with ultracold atoms to further the field of quantum simulation and explore questions related to quantum computing. While the COVID-19 crisis has made for a strange first semester, he’s looking forward to returning to campus and developing a lab where he can continue his work cooling atoms to mimic quantum systems from condensed matter, nuclear, and high-energy particle physics.
“One direction that I’m very interested in is looking at chemistry, where you have complete control of the quantum states of the reactants and you can learn about the underlying dynamics of a chemical reaction,” said Jamison.
“There is a potential to use molecules together for quantum computing. That’s one of the many reasons it made a lot of sense to be in the IQC with so many people doing these sorts of things.”
