Levitated Nanophysics Group

It was a great pleasure for us all to attend the inaugural British Optomechanics Research Network (BORN) meeting in Nottingham. This research area is approaching critical mass in the UK, and it’s great to have a strong sense of community.

To test quantum physics, the community needs to move towards working with smaller nanoparticles. To do this, we need better optics. This work presents a method for building tiny, robust, and high-performance optical resonators, for cooling nanoparticles:

Silicon microcavity arrays with open access and a finesse of half a million

We are organizing a Levitated Optomechanics conference in the Physikzentrum, aka “the Physics Castle” in Bad Honef, Germany. Attendence is free!

We have spaces for attendees, poster presentations, and contributed talks. Apply here:
https://www.we-heraeus-stiftung.de/veranstaltungen/seminare/2019/levitated-optomechanics/main/

We’re excited to be involved with the Macroscopic Quantum Superpositions collaboration, looking at new ways to explore fundamental physics. We attended the inaugural meeting at Imperial College.

A 5 micron silica microparticle levitated in our Paul trap.

We have an opening for an ERC funded Postdoc, for 2 years extendable to 4 years. Short blurb:

The Levitated Nanophysics group at King’s is a new research team investigating the boundary between quantum physics and nanotechnology. In this role, you will shape the new field of rotational optomechanics, with opportunities to develop technology as well as explore fundamental physics.

Full details, and information on how to apply, can be found here.

Lots of progress in the new lab!

Optical trap for levitating nanorods. Good work Yanhui!

Ion trap for levitating microparticles, with pick-up electrodes for monitoring particle motion. Nice work Katie and Muddassar!