Covey receives NSF CAREER Award

Illinois Physics Assistant Professor Jacob Covey has been selected for a 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding junior faculty who excel in both research and teaching and who demonstrate the potential to become lifetime leaders in their respective fields.

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 device engineering. His innovative work has applications in quantum information, quantum networking, and quantum error correction.

Covey’s CAREER award will support a project titled, “Operating an Optical Atomic Clock Beyond the Laser Coherence and Below the Projection Limit.”

Over the past decade, atomic clocks that are based on optical transitions have emerged as the most accurate metrological tool ever developed. In fact, optical atomic clocks are so precise, they would lose less than one second in the entire age of the universe. Current research seeks to further improve this precision and to deploy optical atomic clocks outside of state-of-the-art laboratories. Both goals require a more efficient use of the atomic resources that drive the clock.

In this project, Covey will use his quantum information science toolbox to optimize the atomic system. Using the ability to independently operate and measure subsets of the atomic array, Covey will encode two atomic clocks within one system and will use one to stabilize the other. Additionally, he will use quantum entanglement, generated by a collective coupling to an optical cavity, to improve the clock precision by mitigating what physicists call “quantum projection noise.”

These two approaches will be combined to realize an atomic clock that helps stabilize the more precise entangled atomic clock, thereby providing a near-optimal use of atomic resources. Remarkably, this vision has a striking resemblance to a fault-tolerant quantum computer. In order to realize these goals, Covey will assemble arrays of ytterbium-171 atoms in optical tweezers, which builds on recent work from his group and on his own past work developing atomic array optical clocks.

This work has implications for a broad range of applications. By merging the capabilities of neutral-atom quantum computers, optical atomic clocks, and quantum networking devices into one system, the project could advance the development of fault-tolerant quantum processors, as well as quantum networks of optical atomic clocks that can provide quantum-secured timekeeping. It could also contribute to the search for new physics: the exceptional accuracy of optical atomic clocks enables incredible timing precision and so could facilitate the study of phenomena that may affect the passage of time, such as gravity, dark matter, and the variation of fundamental constants.

Covey is a recipient of 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 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.