Covey selected for DOE’s Early Career Research Program award

Illinois Physics Professor Jacob Covey has been selected for an Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award by the U.S. Department of Energy. Founded in 2010, the ECRP award program aims to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work.

Covey is one of 91 DOE Early Career Scientists selected nationwide this year by outside peer review. The DOE has earmarked $138 million for this year’s cohort, to be paid out over a 5-year term.

Covey is an experimentalist specializing in atomic physics and quantum optics. In his lab, Covey exploits the capabilities of alkaline earth atoms—in particular, “Rydberg atom arrays”—to explore a range of topics in fundamental physics, from metrology to quantum engineering. His innovative work has applications in quantum information, quantum networking, and quantum error correction.

Covey’s winning ECRP research proposal titled “Simulating nuclear physics with nuclear spin qudits” will leverage techniques recently analyzed and proposed by his group to encode multiple quantum bits (“qubits”) within a single atom. These techniques offer a route to improve the hardware efficiency of certain quantum computing and networking applications.

The proposed experiment will employ “qudits”—quantum bits having more than two encodable states—to more efficiently model the high-dimensional spaces that are intrinsically present in the lattice gauge theories of quantum electrodynamics (QED) and chromodynamics (QCD). For example, quarks—the elementary particles that make up protons and neutrons—are described by flavor, color, spin, and matter/anti-matter degrees of freedom. Covey will leverage 4- and 8-dimensional spaces of neutral ytterbium-171 atoms to implement quantum computing algorithms that simulate, for example, 1+1 dimensional quark scattering, as a steppingstone to larger-scale and higher-dimensional digital quantum simulations of lattice QCD.

The research will utilize an electronic qubit, a nuclear spin qubit, and a motional qubit all within a single atom, where each can be controlled independently. The ability to convert the 8-dimensional (2³) qudit codes to an equivalent three-qubit-based code hinges on a method recently proposed by the Covey research group in preparation for this experiment.

Covey will conduct this research in close collaboration with Illinois Physics Professor Patrick Draper, establishing a direct connection between the quantum-computing research and the high-energy physics research programs at Illinois Physics.

Covey has previously been recognized with numerous early career awards, including the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the 2023 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award and the 2022 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award. He holds two patents, one for multiplexed telecommunication-band quantum networking with atom arrays in optical cavities, the other for controlling alkaline earth atoms for quantum computing and metrology applications.

At Illinois, he is a member of the Materials Research Laboratory and of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST).

Covey received a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics, physics, and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and master’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013 and 2017. He was a Richard Chace Tolman Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology from 2017 to 2020, before joining the faculty at Illinois Physics in 2020.