Justin Gerber

PhD Candidate

Office: 301B LeConte
Phone: (510) 642-7437
Email: gerberja at berkeley dot edu

Lab: cQED, Optical Lattice
Lab room: LL104 Campbell
Lab phone: (510) 664-4841

Justin joined the group in early 2014 and is working on constructing the new cavity microscope experiment, E6. E6 is an exciting new experiment which has recently been completed which is studying the physics of cavity QED. In particular E6 is expanding the toolbox of cavity QED by including a high resolution optical microscope which looks at the atomic sample within the cavity. The local control and readout afforded by the microscope combined with the control and readout afforded by the cavity open the doors for the exploration of a range of interesting quantum phenomena.

What Justin loves most about atomic physics is how it gives him the opportunity to explore a very wide range of scientific topics ranging from questions such as:

  • How exactly does an acousto optic deflector work?

  • What happens if you shine light with orbital angular momentum onto a quantum gas?

  • How can you use an optical cavity to measure the state of atoms inside the cavity at the fundamental precision levels set by quantum mechanics?

  • Which interpretation of quantum mechanics do I and other prefer and why? (possibly a topic to be avoided in polite company!)

This is just a small sampling of the range technical and scientific questions that Justin has had the opportunity of being exposed to working in the Ultracold physics group at UC Berkeley.

Outside of lab Justin’s hobbies include hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, snowboarding, sailing, triathlon training and thinking about Fourier transforms.

Please get in contact with me if you have any questions about our research group, or would like to learn more about UC Berkeley Physics!

Justin graduated from CU Boulder in 2013 where he worked on scattering scanning near field optical microscopy, a technique which can provide, among other things, sub-diffraction limited spectroscopic information about various interesting samples. Justin worked in particular with domain walls in single and bilayer graphene.