Dr. Douglas G. Bopp

I am an atomic physicist with a passion for shrinking the lab using photonics and microfabrication to bring atomic technologies to the public. In general, leveraging advanced manufacturing techniques with an eye towards precision device fabrication has demonstrated its immense potential in the microelectronics industry and has been slowly transforming all other domains of next-generation sensors, references and actuators.

Atoms are fundamental resources capable of delivering precision, accuracy and stability to many systems and are easily interrogated with low-powered optical fields. My current group, under group leader John Kitching at NIST, Boulder, has pioneered the Chip Scale Atomic Clock and has continued to build some of the most sensitive and portable atomic magnetometers the world has ever seen which are poised to form the basis for next generation brain imaging and natural resource exploration.

I have focused on precision spectroscopy in micro vapor cells and their fabrication specifically for optical frequency references. Current work is related to a variety of technologies that utilize atomic vapors to lock lasers to a tunable range of frequencies with high stability. By building tunable and stable optical frequency references, precision photonic measurements can be made more sensitive which is an exciting prospect for enhancing the exquisite performance of state of the art plasmonic biosensors, ultrahigh Q ring resonators, and optomechanical structures coupled to AFM tips. With a focus on simplicity, mass manufacturability and low size, weight and power, we have been building integrated atomic devices which can also manipulate light through dispersion engineering. Such tunable optical frequency references with high stability also find their place in enhancing the information density in telecommunications systems.