Faculty Spotlight
Cindy Regal:听Associate Professor, Department of Physics; JILA Fellow
Research interests
Regal鈥檚 main research interest is engineering and exploring isolated quantum systems for quantum information and quantum optics. In particular, she focuses on manipulating single and few neutral atoms and the quest to control single phonons in mesoscopic mechanical oscillators. This experimental work relies upon low-loss optical interfaces and laser cooling and trapping techniques.
Education and experience
Regal joined the University of Colorado Boulder faculty in 2010 as an assistant professor of physics and associate fellow of JILA. She earned her PhD in physics from CU Boulder in 2006 and then served as a postdoctoral researcher at JILA until 2007. Before returning to CU Boulder, she served as a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2010.听
Quotable and notable
Regal was named a 2018 Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecturer by the Gordon Research Conferences, a prestigious title is given worldwide to scientists at the top of their fields in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. She was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017 and won the CO-Labs Colorado Governor鈥檚 Award for high-impact Research in 2016.听
In research published last year in Physical Review X, a team of scientists led by Regal reported that they trapped single, neutral rubidium atoms with a 90 percent probability, using tiny laser beams, also called 鈥渙ptical tweezers.鈥�
Lone atoms are a potential building block for harnessing quantum physics. Explaining the challenge, Regal said, 鈥淏its in a quantum computer will necessarily be tiny things. And every tiny thing presents its own challenges for wrangling.鈥�
Cindy Regal