Biography

My parents are immigrants to America and have heavily influenced my life. I grew up in Beijing China, but at age of 20, I immigrated to the U.S. and soon came to Stony Brook University as physics major. Both study and life were tough at the beginning, but I adapted to new environment soon.

My research experience started with Dr. Harold Metcalf in August, 2014. I directly joined the PhD project laser cooling without spontaneous emission assisting his two graduate students.  We demonstrated laser cooling without spontaneous emission using the bichromatic force. It works by restricting the atom-light interaction to an extremely short time compared with the natural decay rate. I have been working on this project, still in progress, for almost two years. My job was developing a simulation to support our experiment. Laser cooling without spontaneous emission is still a controversial issue, since it’s widely believed that spontaneous emission is necessary in laser cooling to remove entropy and transfer energy. Under these circumstances, a precise simulation to verify the correctness of our results is very important.

I started with the FORTRAN code modified by a PhD student and my work directly contributed to the publication (J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 32, B75–B83 2015). My most important contribution to this paper is that I wrote a new Matlab code working together with the Fortran code, which could output a group of atomic trajectories, to draw the atomic velocity distribution which can be directly compared with experimental data to see how well we understand the physics.

We demonstrated laser cooling in the bichromatic field. To simulate laser cooling in a more general light field, I made several major changes to the FORTRAN code. With the new code, I simulated strong optical forces from single standing wave light fields with high intensity and large detuning. In the summer of 2015, I successfully included the longitudinal velocity effect in this calculation to simulate dependence of atomic position distribution on the Rabi Frequency in the bichromatic field. The results are consistent with our measurements and this work was presented in DAMOP 2015 and 2016. Additionally, Dr. Metcalf and I published a paper on it.

Apart from the simulation, I also gained much hand-on experience in our lab.  I dismantled and repaired a detector composed of a micro-channel plate and a phosphor screen. This work not only gave me a better understanding of the detector, but also taught me the techniques of vacuum system maintenance. Also, I operated and locked our ultraviolet laser system. The most important experience is alignment, assembly, maintenance, and operation of the Ti-Sapphire laser. This valuable experience taught me relevant skills and makes me qualified to do Ph.D. level research in graduate school .

Through the work with Dr. Metcalf, I was deeply impressed by the beauty of atomic motion and the fascination of the interaction between the light and atoms. Curiosity about the physics behind them motivated me to pursue graduate level study