David DeMille

Biosketch

David P. DeMille, PhD is Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago and holds a Joint Appointment in the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He earned his AB in Physics from the University of Chicago and his MS and PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He joined the faculty at Amherst College in 1997, then moved to Yale University in 1998, then to the University of Chicago and Argonne in 2020. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the NAS. Honors include the Norman F. Ramsey Prize and the Francis M. Pipkin Award of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests

Dr. DeMille’s research centers on quantum control and measurement of gas-phase molecules and atoms. A major recurring theme is to perform spectroscopic measurements in these systems that can reveal information about fundamental laws of physics. Many of these experiments use properties of simple molecules to amplify the effects of interest, often by many orders of magnitude, relative to prior experiments with similar goals using atoms. For example, DeMille has made precise measurements of the spin resonance frequency of electrons inside polarized thorium monoxide molecules, in order to detect a possible electric dipole moment of the electron. This quantity can be induced by the existence of new quantum fields, beyond those in the standard model of particle physics, even if the masses of associated particles are large enough to exceed the reach of high-energy colliders. DeMille and his group have also developed techniques for cooling and trapping of molecular gases, analogous to the methods used for decades to produce ultracold atomic gases, with possible applications in quantum computation, quantum simulation, and precision measurements for fundamental physics.