Yuval Shagam

Quantum science and technology with trapped molecular ions. sensing techniques, chiral molecules, precision measurement, cold quantum physics.

I studied for my MSc and PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science in the lab of Prof. Ed Narevicius. We researched quantum effects in cold chemistry. At low temperatures, the wave-like properties of a collision are enhanced becoming observable in the lab. These include resonance phenomena in chemistry and the effect of internal degrees of freedom on products with full quantum control. We observed a number of these effects in the lab for the first time by building an experiment to reach temperatures as low as 10 mK in neutral-neutral reactions.

In 2016, I moved to JILA which is a research institute of the University of Colorado and NIST, and began working as a postdoc with Prof. Eric Cornell and Prof. Jun Ye. We used a chemical toolbox to search for new physics by measuring the permanent electric dipole moment of an electron or in other words measuring its “shape”. We performed precision spectroscopy on a specific molecule that enhances the signature of the electron’s dipole moment while developing new tools in molecular physics towards this goal.

In 2021 I joined the Schulich faculty of chemistry at the Technion.

Education:

2007-2010 – BSc in Physics and Computer Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2010-2012 – MSc in Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science

2013-2016 – PhD in Chemical Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science

2016-2020 – Postdoctoral research associate, JILA, University of Colorado and NIST, Boulder, Colorado

2021-present – Assist. Prof. Technion

Awards:

National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2018

John F. Kennedy Prize of the Feinberg Graduate School, 2017

American Physical Society, Justin Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award in Chemical Physics, 2017

Israel Chemical Society, Excellent Graduate Student 2016

Rothschild Fellow, Yad Hanadiv, 2016-2017

Selected publications:

Second-scale coherence measured at the quantum projection noise limit with hundreds of molecular ions

1. Zhou*, Y. Shagam*, W. B. Cairncross, K. B. Ng, T. S. Roussy, T. Grogan, K. Boyce, A. Vigil, M. Pettine, T. Zelevinsky, J. Ye, E. A. Cornell Phys. Rev. Lett., 124, 053201 (2020)

Phase protection of Fano-Feshbach resonances

1. Blech*, Y. Shagam*, N. Hölsch, P. Paliwal, W. Skomorowski, J. W. Rosenberg, N. Bibelnik O. Heber, D. Reich, E. Narevicius, C. P. Koch

Nature Comm. 11, 999 (2020)

Directly probing anisotropy in atom molecule collisions through quantum scattering resonances

1. Klein*, Y. Shagam*, W. Skomorowski, P. S. Żuchowski, M. Pawlak, L. M. C. Janssen, N. Moiseyev, S. Y. T. van de Meerakker, A. van der Avoird, C. P. Koch, E. Narevicius

Nature Physics 13, 35 (2017)

Molecular hydrogen interacts more strongly when rotationally excited at low temperatures leading to faster reactions

1. Shagam, A. Klein, W. Skomorowski, R. Yun, V. Averbukh, C. Koch, E. Narevicius

Nature Chemistry, 7, 921 (2015)

Observation of the isotope effect in sub-kelvin reactions

Lavert-Ofir*, Y. Shagam*, A. B. Henson, S. Gersten, J. Klos, P. S. Żuchowski, J. Narevicius, and E. Narevicius

Nature Chemistry 6, 332 (2014)