April 2026

High motional frequency paper on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03435

Trapped ions exhibit harmonic quantum motion. This work explores how to push that harmonic frequency by an order-of-magnitude and the physics of what happens when you do. The physics of laser cooling changes, the coherence of quantum motional states improves rapidly, and the speed at which experiments can be run increases dramatically. Taken together, this new regime of high motional frequencies enable much faster runtimes, bosonic quantum error correction, improved quantum sensing and networking, nonlinear phononics, and more!

February 2026

Congrats to BYU Physics majors: Cayman Quinn, Jonas Goodrich, Kai Sandberg and Will Ott, who--along with Nishant Chaudhari (a previous REU student at BYU)--won the 2026 MIT quantum hackathon!

December 2025

Optical tables installed! (and overhead shelving)

After sliding the part of the roof out of the way, two nearly one tonne tables were lowered by crane into the underground lab! These tables will be the foundation for our main experiments. Laser systems and vacuum chambers, which hosts the ion trap, coming online next!