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William McGehee (Fed)

Physicist

William McGehee is a physicist in the Atomic Devices and Instrumentation group in the Time and Frequency division at NIST. His research focuses on the development of fieldable quantum sensors based on laser-cooled gases and atomic beams using novel vacuum technology, integrated photonics, and optical spectroscopy. He has a long-standing interesting in applications for laser-cooled atoms including quantum simulation of highly-correlated systems and the production of high-brightness ion sources for nanotechnology applications. He received a B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015.

Selected Publications

Magneto-optical trapping using planar optics

Author(s)
William McGehee, Wenqi Zhu, Daniel Barker, Daron Westly, Alexander Yulaev, Nikolai Klimov, Amit Agrawal, Stephen Eckel, Vladimir Aksyuk, Jabez J. McClelland
Laser-cooled atoms are a key component of many calibration-free measurement platforms— including clocks, gyroscopes, and gravimeters—and are a promising

Direct-write Lithiation of Silicon Using a Focused Ion Beam of Li+

Author(s)
William R. McGehee, Evgheni Strelcov, Vladimir P. Oleshko, Christopher L. Soles, Nikolai B. Zhitenev, Jabez J. McClelland
Electrochemical processes that govern the performance of lithium ion batteries involve numerous parallel reactions and interfacial phenomena that complicate the

Publications

Next-Generation Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks

Author(s)
John Kitching, Matthew Hummon, William McGehee, Ying-Ju Wang, Susan Schima
We describe work toward the development of next-generation chip-scale atomic clocks, which combine small size, low power consumption and manufacturability with

A chip-scale atomic beam clock

Author(s)
Gabriela Martinez, Chao Li, Alexander Staron, John Kitching, Chandra Raman, William McGehee
We demonstrate a passively pumped, chip-scale atomic beam clock fabricated using a stack of silicon and glass wafers. The device could additionally serve as a
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Patents (2018-Present)

Depiction of miniaturized atomic beam source. (a) Schematic of the Rb beam source. (b) Image of assembled device. (c) Rb fluorescence spectrum measuring the transverse velocity distribution of the atomic beam, and Rb absorption spectrum measuring the Rb vapor density feeding the channel array. A saturated absorption spectrum from a natural abundance Rb cell is included for reference.

Chip-Scale Atomic Beam System

NIST Inventors
Elizabeth Donley , John Kitching and William McGehee
The invention is a device for creating a collimated atomic beam in an evacuated vacuum package fabricated from lithographically defined or machined, planar structures and with components to source atomic vapor and passive pumps to maintain vacuum conditions. We have developed a chip-scale system for
View All Patents
Created August 15, 2019, Updated April 20, 2023
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