Updates.

GRC 2026 - Mechanics

Last week, Samuel attended the lab’s first conference: GRC Mechanics (»Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime«), with the theme »Connecting Quantum Systems with Phonons«. Hosted in beautiful Tuscany, the week focused on recent developments in the field. Held biennially and alternating between the US and Europe, it’s a must-visit conference. Looking forward to 2028 in Ventura, CA.

Samuel gave a talk about our progress at the LINQS Lab at Stanford titled »Piezo-Driven Optomechanics: Toward Two-Fridge Entanglement and Robotic Assistance«. He talked about the state of our experiments in microwave-to-optics transduction and our recent efforts to use robotics in nanofabrication.

We landed!

The lab has officially started, and ALPS was welcomed with snow in the Saarland.

A few renovations still have to happen, but I am optimistic that April can be a realistic start in my new lab rooms. Currently we have offices for PhD students. We decided on some more plans for the lab layout with the technical support here.

For the first two weeks, we visited the other must-see sights here: the Saarschleife, Völklinger Hütte, and Luxembourg. We ended with the Night of the Profs, a party where professors DJ.

ALPS lab is coming to the Saarland!

In January 2026, it is time to say goodbye to California and hello to the Saarland! We will be based in Saarbrücken, Germany, at Saarland University, and will be working on a variety of research projects in quantum emitters, integrated photonics, and robotics.

I am curious to explore how we can do research in 2026 with robots taking a hand in the process. We are thinking of using them for nanofabrication, but also for configuring optical setups and loading new spectroscopy samples into the cryostat. For robotics, we are interested in conventional control as well as recent advances in robotic control.

We are looking for more reliable measurement and fabrication results, more data without more hours in the lab, and to move mundane tasks onto the shoulders of robots.

I am looking for 2 PhD students, starting around April 2026.

If you want to do a master’s thesis, are interested in looking into a PhD, or test the waters of academic research with an internship, please reach out.

We are online!

More updates should be coming in the next months. For now, visit our lab in Saarbrücken after January 2026.