Stephen Eckel (Fed)

Stephen Eckel is an expert in cold atom systems, sensors and atomtronics. He joined the Thermodynamic Metrology Group in 2016 to help develop the new cold atom vacuum standard as part of the cold core technology program. An active member of the American Physical Society, his research interests include cold atom sensors, photonics, and their integration.

Stephen’s research background is quite varied. As a postdoctoral researcher at NIST, he helped develop atomtronic sensors for rotation, observe unique effects in ring-shaped condensates like hysteresis, and simulate other physical phenomena like cosmological expansion. As a graduate student, he worked on two projects attempting to measure the electron’s electric dipole moment, a property, which if it exists, would violate parity and time symmetry and point to physics beyond the standard model.

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A New Way to Measure Nearly Nothing