Prize Recipient

Brian DeMarco
NIST, Boulder

Citation:

"Quantum Degenerate Fermi Gas
"

Background:

Brian DeMarco finished his undergraduate education at SUNY Geneseo in 1996, graduating summa cum laude with honors. As an undergraduate researcher, Brian worked on calibrating and developing neutron detectors for laser driven inertial confinement fusion experiments. Brian began his graduate research with Eric Cornell at JILA at the University of Colorado in 1996, switching advisors after his first year to start his thesis work with Deborah Jin. After two years of effort, Brian and Debbie succeeded in producing the first Fermi gas of atoms in 1999. This accomplishment was selected by Science magazine as one of the top ten scientific achievements of 1999 and earned Brian the first JILA Scientific Achievement Award. After defending his dissertation in 2001, Brian secured an NRC postdoctoral fellowship to work with David Wineland at NIST Boulder on quantum computing experiments with trapped atomic ions. Brian's current work with the Ion Storage Group at NIST Boulder concentrates on implementing improved quantum logic elements and "scaling-up" the complexity of quantum information processing tasks with trapped ions.

Selection Committee:

Deborah Watson (Co-Chair), Reinhold Blumel, Ron Olson, Steve Lundeen, Mark Kasevich