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Stanford Report on Assoc Memory

Stanford Report publishes news article on recent Science paper. Here's the Stanford Report article and more info: We have created the first quantum-optical associative memory, published in Science 394, 212…

Endowed Professorship!

Prof. Lev has been awarded a named, endowed chair—he is now the Stanford Fortitude Professor.

First CavMat paper!

A paper presenting the CavMat apparatus has been published in Review of Scientific Instruments!

"Sizzle reel" for Lev talk

Prof. Lev gave a Fireside Chat talk on quantum and STEM to Castilleja School, a girls middle and high school in the Bay Area. This is the " Sizzle reel " movie they made for his introduction.

CBS news on WSP@Stanford

For Veteran's Day 2025, KPIX CBS News Bay Area interviews Prof. Benjamin Lev and Stanford veteran Oscar Mier about the Warrior-Scholar Project STEM bootcamp Lev leads at Stanford.

Cover of PRL!

Our paper on Ising spin glasses made the cover of Physical Review Letters! B. P. Marsh, D. Atri Schuller, Y. Ji, H. S. Hunt, G. Z. Socolof, D. P. Bowman, J. Keeling, and B. L. Lev, A multimode cavity QED Ising…

New Science paper!

We have created the first quantum-optical associative memory, published in Science 394, 212 (2026)! We experimentally show that one can store and recall memories in a spin glass, which was long thought not…

Ising spin glass in PRL

We've realized the first quantum-optical Ising spin glass! B. P. Marsh, D. Atri Schuller, Y. Ji, H. S. Hunt, G. Z. Socolof, D. P. Bowman, J. Keeling, and B. L. Lev, A multimode cavity QED Ising spin glass…

Marsh wins NRC fellowship!

Congratulations to grad student Brendan Marsh, recipient of a prestigious NRC postdoc fellowship! Brendan will join Prof. Adam Kaufman's group at JILA in Boulder.

Lev leads bootcamp for veterans

A summer STEM academic bootcamp for veterans helps pave a path to higher education. The Warrior-Scholar Project, launched in 2011, aims to remove veterans’ barriers to higher education by introducing small…

Entanglement in a spin glass

New theory paper in PRX explores the relationship between entanglement and replica symmetry breaking in quantum spin glasses in a confocal cavity QED setting.

QFARM Spotlight on Marsh

What first got you excited about science? Mostly science fiction, to be honest! I was a big star wars nerd growing up and my dad really liked watching shows about black holes and the universe. I always thought…

Rapidity of 1D dipolar gas

We report the first measurements of the rapidity and momentum distributions of equilibrium dipolar 1D gases.

Benjamin Lev 2021 APS Fellow

Benjamin Lev, Physics & Applied Physics Professor, along with Physics Professors Srinivas Raghu and Monika Schleier-Smith, are new APS Fellows for work in quantum physics. By Taylor Kubota The APS Fellowship…

Video of Lev's VAMOS seminar talk

Watch here for Prof. Benjamin Lev's VAMOS seminar talk on "Topological pumping of a 1D dipolar gas into strongly correlated prethermal states." This work was repored in Science.

Nature: Optical lattice with sound

Our paper has appeared in Nature regarding the creation of the first optical lattice with sound vibrations—phonons. This opens many new directions in the field of quantum simulation of quantum many-body…

Quantum Archimedes' Screw published in Science

LevLab has created a quantum Archimedes' screw. See paper published in Science From Stanford News article By adding some magnetic flair to an exotic quantum experiment, Benjamin Lev's group produced an…

Cavity QED neural network

New theoretical work appeared in PRX and was highlighted in an APS Physics Synopsis. It marks a major advance in our understanding of the exciting and highly active topic of quantum optical systems and…

Light plays the role of sound

Read news article "Quantum Simulation Stars Light in the Role of Sound" by Bailey Bedford on our recent theory paper in PRL.

Pairing atoms in 1D with photons

New theory paper in PRL shows how to use photon-mediated interactions in a multimode optical cavity to induces a peierls transition in a 1D Bose or Fermi gas. The transition is to a paired state that creates a…

Quantum many-body scars

We have created novel quantum many-body scar states by topologically pumping a 1D dipolar Bose gas of dysprosium. Wow quantum holonomy!

Imaging with SQCRAMscope

First science from SQCRAMscope! We have imaged the electron nematic transport in iron-based pnictide high-Tc superconductors. Read about it in Nature Physics here.

Dynamical Spin-Orbit Coupling

We demonstrated dynamical spin-orbit-coupling in a BEC for the first time using an optical cavity. The resulting state is a spinor-helix polarition condensate. Paper appeared in PRL.

Interactions from Gouy phases

Two papers, here and here, show how Gouy phases modify photon-mediated interactions in multimode cavity QED. Both chosen for Editors' Suggestion and featured in APS Physicis Synopsis: A Step Toward Simulating…

Dipolar Quantum Newton's Cradle

Published in Phys. Rev X. New work on thermalization in near-integrable system. See popular press: Editors' Choice Watching magnetic atoms thermalize in Science News: Quantum Physics A tiny version of this…

Tunable interactions PRX

PRX paper published. Results demostrate tunable range, photon-mediated atom-atom interactions using BECs in multimode cavity QED. See also APS Physics Viewpoint by Hakan Türeci.

Congratulations to Dr. Edkins!

Dr. Steve Edkins won Institute of Physics prize for best PhD thesis in the field of superconductivity for 2016. Congratulations, Steve!

Edkins Thesis Prize

Congratulations to Steve Edkins on winning the Springer Thesis Prize! Springer published his PhD thesis as a book on Amazon. Check it out!

Smashing magnets

Collisions of Dy BECs yield halos of dipolar scattered atoms. See movie made by Andrew Sykes. See also Perspective "Smashing Magnets" by Igor Ferrier-Barbut. Published in New Journal of Physics.

Supermode condensate

A new nonequilibrium state of matter. To appear in Phys Rev Applied. ArXiv version

Dy spin-orbit-coupling

We created the first spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Fermi gas with Dy! Read about it in PRX here.

Coupling to cavity with DMD

Digital Micromirror Devices (DMD) provide a robust platform with which to implement digital holography, in principle providing the means to rapidly generate propagating transverse electromagnetic fields with…

Tenure

Benjamin promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

New Dy BECs!

We report Bose-Einstein condensation of two isotopes of the highly magnetic element dysprosium: 162Dy and 160Dy. For 162Dy, condensates with 10^5 atoms form below T = 50 nK. We find the evaporation efficiency…

Multimode cavity QED

We present a novel cavity QED system in which a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is trapped within a high-finesse optical cavity whose length may be adjusted to access both single-mode and multimode…

Fermionic suppression

We observe the suppression of inelastic dipolar scattering due to Fermi statistics in ultracold gases of the highly magnetic atom, dysprosium. Inelastic dipolar scattering in non-zero magnetic fields leads to…

Congratulations Dr. Lu!

Congratulations to Mingwu! Dr. Mingwu Lu defended his thesis June 2014 and is now a postdoc with Prof. Jeff Kimble at Caltech.

Dy Feshbach resonances

We report in this Phys. Rev. A Rapid paper ( arXiv ) the observation of resonance-like loss in the trap population of ultracold dysprosium as a function of magnetic field, which we attribute to…

Cryogenic atom chip

Paper on the reconfigurable atom chip trapping of atoms near cryogenic materials published in Appl. Phys. Lett. We demonstrate a novel atom chip trapping system that allows the placement and high-resolution…

Dy SO-coupling proposal

Lev and theory collaborators publish paper in PRA Rapid Communications on creating synthetic gauge fields with Dy.

Lev wins ONR YIP

Lev wins Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award ONR YIP!

Soft quantum matter PRA

Theory paper on soft quantum matter in multimode cavity QED published in Phys. Rev. A and selected for a Viewpoint in APS Physics.

Two Dy PRAs

Two dysprosium papers published in PRA fall 2010. Papers detail Dy MOT physics and a novel sub-Doppler laser cooling mechanism in Dy.

Dy MOT PRL

Dy MOT and magnetic trap collisions paper published in Phys. Rev. Lett. Research highlight in Nature, and popular science article in Physics World.

Superstripes paper in Nature Physics

A method to observe supersolids and superstripes? Lev helps propose a multimode cavity QED experiment to realize "soft" matter in ultracold atomic gases. See our Nature Physics aricle and the News and Views…

LevLab wins DOE grant

LevLab wins single PI grant from the DOE, division BES in the Electron and Scanning Probe Microscopies program for development of cryogenic atom chip microscopy.

Winning MURI team

LevLab is part of the winning MURI team lead by Chris Monroe at the JQI for development of Quantum Optical Circuits of Hybrid Quantum Memories. See our MURI website and news bulletin.

World's First Dy MOT

Announcing the world's first Dysprosium magneto-optical trap (MOT)! News bulletin

Spin glass in multimode cavity QED proposal

Spin glass and Hopefield neural network in multimode cQED paper appears in PRL. Collaboration between Lev and theorists Paul Goldbart (GaTech) and Sarang Gopalakrishnan (Harvard).

Lev wins AFOSR YIP

Lev wins Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program ( AFOSR YIP ) award for the laser cooling of Dy project!