University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) are federally-funded, non-profit research centers affiliated with a university. These centers feel like a blend between academia and industry, and they offer rewarding research careers for newly minted PhD recipients. In this talk, I will discuss the quantum research being done at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), a UARC affiliated with the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. I will go in depth in my own research in Rydberg atom-based electric field sensing. I will also discuss my path from UMich physics to GTRI.

Michael Viray is a Research Scientist at GTRI. He works in the Quantum Systems Division of the Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory of GTRI. Before GTRI, he was a PhD student at the University of Michigan from 2015 to 2021, working in Professor Georg Raithel's group. His thesis work focused on photoionization and plasma dynamics in cold atom systems.