Prize Recipient

Adam Kaufman
University of Colorado and JILA, Boulder

"Laser cooling atoms to indistinguishability: Atomic Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and entanglement through spin exchange."

Adam Kaufman received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 2009, where he worked on a Bose-Einstein condensate experiment in the group of David Hall. Adam pursued graduate studies in Cindy Regal’s new group at JILA and the University of Colorado at Boulder; his work was supported by a National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship. As part of his Ph.D. work, he and his colleagues developed an experiment for assembling low-entropy arrays of ground-state neutral atoms in optical tweezers via laser-cooling techniques. In their first result, the group demonstrated three-dimensional ground-state cooling of a single atom in an optical tweezer. They then performed a two-particle interference experiment, in which they observed the atomic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect. In another experiment, they exploited the quantum statistics of transportable atoms to engineer spin-entanglement, opening new avenues for quantum information using optical tweezers. After his graduate studies, Adam accepted a post-doctoral fellowship in the group of Markus Greiner at Harvard University, where he studies bosonic many-body systems in a quantum gas microscope.