Lev grew up in Crystal River, Florida, and attended Crystal River High School. He received his physics bachelor's degree magna cum laude from Princeton in 1999 and his physics Ph.D. from Caltech in 2005, working with Hideo Mabuchi. Lev was an NRC postdoc[6] at JILA with (2006-2007) Jun Ye and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008-2011). He joined the Stanford faculty in 2011, where he is now lllProfessor of lllPhysics[3] and Applied Physics[4] and runs a quantum many-body physics research lab.[7]
Work
Lev's research focuses on exploring quantum many-body physics, especially in nonequilibrium settings. The contributions of his group include:
The first laser cooling and trapping of dysprosium,[8] followed by the first creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate[9] (BEC) and a degenerate Fermi gas[10] of Dy. These were the first quantum gases of an open-shell lanthanide (rare-earth) element.[11] Dysprosium is the most magnetic fermionic element, and terbium and the bosonic isotopes of Dy are the most magnetic bosonic elements.[12] Together with prior work on BECs of chromium,[13] Lev's work opened new research directions using highly magnetic dipolar quantum gases for quantum many-body experiments.[11]
Creation of the first optical lattice with sound.[16][17] The lattice had phonon excitations and formed the first supersolid that possesses a key property of solids, vibration. This work was based on the system of confocal multimode cavity QED with BECs, which was developed by his group and collaborators.[18]
Development of a quantum sensor called the SQCRAMscope, a Scanning Quantum Cryogenic Atom Microscope.[19][20] It was employed in the imaging of nematic electron transport in iron-based superconductors.[21][22][23]