JQI has named four new Fellows in 2019, bringing the total number to 35. All four of the new arrivals have appointments in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. One Fellow is also a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD and another is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Alicia Kollár arrived in August as a JQI Fellow and the Chesapeake Assistant Professor of Physics. She is also a founding member of the QTC.
Kollár earned her doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University in 2016 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University with Andrew Houck. There, she studied quantum simulations of solid-state physics and developed new techniques for creating photonic lattices.
Kollár’s group at JQI will focus on using superconducting qubits for quantum simulations, mostly of condensed matter models. The group will also pursue some theoretical questions, such as how best to mediate interactions between photons. Kollár recently coauthored a paper published in the journal Nature that proposed—and demonstrated with a proof-of-concept experiment—a method for simulating unusual geometries using an array of superconducting circuits. The result was featured in the Back Scatter section of the August issue of Physics Today.