Dr. Julian Schmidt

For my diploma and PhD theses, I worked on ions in optical traps of ions and their interaction with ultracold atoms at the University of Freiburg (group of Tobias Schätz). To study molecules with even higher precision, I moved to the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel for a postdoc, where I trapped and sympathetically cooled hydrogen molecular ions in the group of Laurent Hilico. During this time, a novel method for molecular ion spectroscopy based on quantum logic operations was being pursued by James Chou and Dietrich Leibfried in the Ion Storage Group at NIST. I joined the NIST group in 2020 for a postdoc to learn more about this technique and set up a new cryogenic experiment dedicated to studying molecular ions. Excited by the prospects of scaling up quantum computers and establishing quantum technologies at a large research facility like PSI, I joined the Trapped Ion Quantum Computing group as a Staff Scientist (Tenure Track) in February 2023.