Aikawa lab

We have open positions for postdoc, PhD, and master cources.

If you would like to join our group, please send your CV and a recommendation letter from a researcher working in the related field.

We are attending the worldwide network on levitated optomechanics LeviNet.

We are interested in nanoparticles levitated in vacuum. They have an advantage of being isolated from the environment and are expected to be useful for various applications such as accurate accelerometers and explorations on macroscopic quantum mechanics. The research area is now called levitated optomechanics.

Our lab is working on cooling the motion of levitated nanoparticles to ultralow temperatures and explorations with new physics enabled with ultracold nanoparticles. Recently, we developed a new approach for cooling the motion of nanoparticles in an optical lattice. For details, see this page. Furthermore, we developed a new cooling approach for neutral nanoparticles and demonstrated cooling to the ground state. For details, see this page. We are also interested in ion trapping of charged nanoparticles. For details, see this page.

Figure: Nanoparticles are trapped in an optical lattice produced with an infrared laser. For observing them, a green laser is irradiated.

17 October 2024
Presented at Quantum Physics with Trapped Particles (invited talk by Aikawa and poster by Kamba).

11 October 2024
Presented a seminar talk at University of Wien (by Aikawa).

10 October 2024
Presented a seminar talk at University of Innsbruck (by Aikawa).

27 September 2024
Presented at The 14th Japan-US Joint Seminar on Quantum Electronics and Laser Spectroscopy (by Aikawa).

18 September 2024
Presented at Quantum Engineering of Levitated Systems (by Aikawa).

22 August 2024
　Presented at LeviNet - Zhejiang joint conference on Optical Tweezers in Vacuum (by Aikawa).

21 May 2024
Presented at Czech-Japan workshop on quantum information (by Aikawa).

1 April 2024
　Aikawa Lab. has moved to Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo.
Takuya Kawasaki, Naoki Hara, and Takumi Ukiya joined our group.
Research Fellowships for Young Scientists (DC2) is awarded to M. Kamba.
Spring GX Fellowship is awarded to N. Hara.

26 March 2024　
　N. Kagatani, S. Nakano, and S. Enoki finished the master cource.
D. Koja and R. Tanaka graduted the bachelor cource.

1 December 2023
The paper on feedback cooling six degrees of freedom of a nearly spherical nanoparticle was published on Nature communications.

28 November 2023
Presented at the workshop Feedback in Quantum Machines 2023 (by Aikawa and by Kamba).

31 October 2023　
The paper on momentum measurements of ultracold neutral nanoparticles was published on Physical Review Letters.