HQAN Exchange Visit to Professor Tian Zhong's Lab at University of Chicago

Danielle Woods, a graduate student in Professor Elizabeth Goldschmidt's lab in the Physics department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign visited Professor Tian Zhong's lab at the University of Chicago for a few days in October 2021. This visit was supported by the HQAN Student Exchange Program, which is open to all graduate students and post-docs advised by HQAN-affiliated faculty. 

Woods chronicles her visit as being "completely packed with meetings and thorough discussions with various students, because so many of the projects in Professor Tian Zhong's lab relate to what I currently do or will have to work on in the future."  Zhong lab graduate student Christina Wicker led her around the laboratory spaces and detailed the many aspects of her work in making 1D optical lattice resonators coupled to single Erbium atoms. “She walked me through and demonstrated many of her methods, which are highly applicable to my future goals; precisely calibrating her resonator system's coupling, preparing and measuring her system inside a fridge, and measuring results from a single-atom Erbium coupling," Woods reflected.

In order to do these single-atom measurements, the frequency and power of the resonant laser must be precisely controlled and stabilized. This process, involving the use of a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) control, was developed and explained to Woods by Dr. Yizhong Huang and student Xuntao Wu.

Woods also had the opportunity to explore Hong Qiao's flame-heated fiber pulling station. "As I am in the process of building a similar setup for slightly different puroses, the students were able to provide in-depth details and demonstrations of their experiments as well as provide their different perspectives and insightful thoughts on my own methods," she said.

Danielle would recommend this exchange program to all HQAN-affiliated graduate students, "Due to the generosity of HQAN and Professor Tian Zhong and his students, I was able to benefit greatly from this lab visit. Many of his students' different projects were highly relevant or directly applicable to my own research work on Erbium-doped microsphere resonators and biconical pulled fibers. Through a number of demonstrations and long discussions with researchers of varying yet relevant specialties, I gained many helpful insights and greater knowledge to further my current research goals at UIUC."

This visit was financially supported by the HQAN Student Exchange Program, which is open to all HQAN-affiliated graduate students and post-docs.  Those interested in visiting an HQAN-affiliated lab should contact their HQAN faculty advisors.