Hank (Henry Hammer) wins a poster prize at the Fall Undergraduate Research Festival (FURF) for his summer research project on wavefront shaping!

Himani Saraswat joins as a Research Assistant (supervised together with Prof. Thomas Folland) on the UI-QSim Jumpstarting Tomorrow program.

The first cryostat arrives (Montana Instruments Cryocore) albeit with a pallet missing (arrived safely later).

With help from Hank during his summer project and Christopher from the Physics workshop, the lab organization is nearly complete. We even have a small dedicated space for quick electronic work (thanks in part to the great component collection of Prof. Paul Kleiber's group).

The first setup is now ready, built, and tested by Hank.

We received a 150k$ grant for 2021-2022 from the Office of the Vice President for Research to jumpstart the development of a quantum simulator using semiconductor materials. Co-PIs on the project are Thomas Folland (Physics), Aditi Bhattacherjee (Chemistry), Joe Gomes(Chemical and Biochemical Engineering), and Xueyu Zhu (Mathematics).

Hank (Henry Hammer) receives a Charles A. Wert Summer Research Grant and will be setting up a NIR-SWIR (C+L telecom bands) wavefront shaping setup for studying multimode fibers during June-July 2021.

Crystals contain a forbidden gap, where photons of certain frequency can penetrate only a limited distance. We overcome this limitation through by spatially shaping waves to access the deep dark-regions of a tiny silicon photonic crystal. Other wave forms—including phonons, electrons, and spins—could be tuned using the new method opening a diverse array of applications in miniature light sources and on-chip lasers, qubits, and information processing via photons and phonons.

Optical Tables move into the lab (IATL 292) and are set up. Next phase: clean and organize the lab.

PI Uppu arrives in Iowa City and was greeted with a bit of snow and a wonderful sky, thus marking the start of QLiC Lab's journey! *For those wondering about the lab name: QLiC (pronounced 'click') tries to capture a few aspects at once: 1) 'clicking' (creation) of great ideas, 2) 'clicking' (working together) as a team and, 3) the image of the 'click switch' that we recall when we hear about quantum superposition (bits vs qubits).