Cindy Regal, PhD

Cindy Regal is the Baur-SPIE Professor in Optical Physics and Photonics at JILA, joint institute between the University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Cindy was raised in Duluth, Minnesota and attended Lawrence University in Wisconsin as a physics undergraduate. She was a Hertz Fellow from 2001 to 2006 at JILA. Her thesis work used laser-cooled atomic gases to study physics formerly available only to condensed-matter physicists. Using a cold gas of fermionic potassium atoms, her work helped reveal a new physical system that links BCS superconductors and bosonic superfluids, such as 4He and Bose-Einstein condensates. This transition, known as the BCS-BEC crossover, could be relevant to our basic understanding of high-Tc superconductors.

Cindy’s graduate thesis in addition to receiving a Hertz Thesis Prize was chosen for the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics Thesis Prize. Her work has continued to focus on applications of laser-cooling to studying the quantum regime; for example she has contributed to recent progress to extend laser-cooling from atoms to mesoscopic mechanical oscillators. Cindy is an associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado and a fellow of JILA.