Graduate student Amilcar Jeronimo Perez awarded a DOE SCGSR Fellowship
April 9, 2026
Amilcar's prestigious Fellowship comes from DOE's Office of Science Graduate Student Research. He will spend a year at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee working on his project entitled "Synthesis and Spectroscopic Measurements of Stoichiometric Rare-Earth Crystals". His research is asking some big questions. What are the true limits of precision measurement and spectroscopy with solid-state color centers and how can we reach them? How can this knowledge be generalized to the broader field of precision measurement and spectroscopy?
Here is a more technical description of the project. Stoichiometric rare-earth crystals, where an identical rare-earth isotope occupies every lattice unit cell in the crystal, are a spectroscopist’s dream. They offer a highly ordered crystal with narrow optical linewidths, potentially enabling optical polarization and detection of giant ensembles of coherent nuclear spins approaching Avogadro’s number! Possible applications include the search for new particle physics, quantum sensing, and quantum memories. A remaining challenge is to demonstrate a suitable host crystal that is hydrophobic, stable under vacuum, and has ample ion-ion spacing to avoid wavefunction overlap. Together with Josh Damron’s group at Oak Ridge National Lab, Amilcar will design, synthesize, and conduct spin-resolved spectroscopy studies on a new class of stoichiometric rare-earth crystals, based on trivalent Europium ions (Eu3+).
