The elevator pitch

The hunt begins… As I start my job hunt I have to start thinking about how to market myself and a big part of that is a coming up with a quick pitch on what it is I actually do.

I am an Interdisciplinary physicist with experience intersecting engineering, atomic, molecular and optical physics, and quantum information science. My PhD work has focused on developing hardware, software and experimental protocols aimed at improving quantum computation and quantum-enhanced sensing with trapped ions.

Day-to-day this means I design, build and maintain scientific equipment to control single strontium ions at the quantum level. Two of the biggest motivators for doing this are: firstly, these devices enable sensing of very small signals very accurately such as magnetic fields, electric fields, accelerations, time, etc. and secondly these experiments represent some of the most precisely controlled systems in existence making them prime-candidates for building information processing devices. This is a wide-field of study that many groups around the world participate in, our focus to contribute to this field has been to develop protocols that minimize control resources used in implementing quantum logic gates, and expand the sensing range of single-ion systems to compete with faster solid-state or neutral atom sensors.