Daniel Slichter, PhD

Daniel Slichter is a staff physicist in the Ion Storage Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.

His research focuses on quantum information experiments with trapped atomic ions, with an emphasis on developing new paradigms for scalable trapped ion quantum computing. Recent projects include performing high-fidelity two-ion entangling operations with microwave and rf magnetic fields instead of lasers, achieving entangled state fidelities rivaling those from best laser-based gates; using strong unitary squeezing of ion motion to enhance ion-ion interactions and to perform electric field sensing below the standard quantum limit; and integrating superconducting photon detectors into microfabricated ion traps as an initial step in building a fully chip-integrated trapped ion quantum processor.

Slichter received his A.B. in physics from Harvard University in 2004, his M.A. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. His Ph.D. research was in superconducting quantum information, where he performed the first continuous high-fidelity state readout of a superconducting qubit and studied quantum feedback, measurement backaction, and near-quantum-limited parametric amplification. He has been at NIST since 2012, first as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently as a staff physicist.

Slichter was the recipient of a Hertz Foundation Fellowship (2006-2011), the Hertz Foundation Thesis Prize (2012), and an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012-2014). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering.