Kristine M. Lang

Assistant Professor Department of Physics Colorado College 14 E. Cache La Poudre Street Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3298 Phone: 719-389-6821 Fax: 719-389-6388 email: kmlang@coloradocollege.edu

Guest Researcher Electromagnetic Technology Division NIST 325 Broadway, M.S. 814.03 Boulder, CO 80305 Phone: 303-497-4378 Fax: 303-497-3042 email: kmlang@boulder.nist.gov

Courses

Research

My research is in experimental low-temperature solid state physics focusing on scanning probe microscopy and superconductivity.

NIST- Postdoctoral and ongoing research: Development a superconducting Josephson-junction quantum bit.
Quantum computation is a theoretical idea that calculations can be done a massively parallel way by exploiting the superposition of states inherent in quantum mechanics.   Researchers are currently working to turn this idea into reality by making single quantum bits (qubits) out of a variety of different physical systems.  I am working to develop a qubit based on a particular physical system, namely a superconducting Josephson-junction.  A Josephson-junction is a essentially a layered superconductor sandwich in which the 'bread' is a superconductor (aluminum in our case) and the 'meat' is an insulating layer (aluminum oxide for us).  One of the biggest problems to making a qubit is increasing the 'coherence time'- which is just the length of time that the bit continues to store meaningful information before the environment gives it a random kick and the information is lost.  For our Josephson-junction based system, we think that the nanometer scale properties of the aluminum oxide are an important determining factor for the coherence time.  In my research,  I use a conducting atomic force microscope and a scanning tunneling microscope to image the properties of this aluminum oxide layer on the nanometer scale.   We hope that these images will help us understand our current short coherence times and provide ideas for how to build a better quantum bit.

UC Berkeley- Ph.D. Thesis Research: Study of high temperature superconductors with a scanning tunneling microscope.
Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without any resistance below a certain temperature called the critical temperature.  For ordinary superconductors this critical temperature is very low, about 1 or 10 K; however, in 1986 a new kind of superconductor was discovered which had a much higher critical temperature, about 100 K.   Although there is a theory to explain how ordinary superconductors work (BCS theory), currently no one really understands how these new high temperature superconductors work.  In order to understand these materials many experimental studies have been done to map out their phenomenology.  In my research I used a scanning tunneling microscope to image a particular high temperature superconductor, Bi₂Sr₂Ca₁Cu₂O_8+x in order to add to the pool of knowledge about these materials.  Click here for more on this project.

CV

Click here for my CV in pdf format.

Papers

Click here for a list of my papers.

Community Service

I am the faculty sponsor of the Society of Physics Students chapter at Colorado College.  Both on my own and together with SPS I have organized many events to promote a sense of community in our department. 

I founded and, for three years, coordinated an organization for women in the fields of physics, astronomy, and geology at Berkeley.  The group, which is still ongoing under a new coordinator, is called the Society for Women in the Physical Sciences (SWPS).  SWPS matches graduate student mentors with undergraduate physical science majors for weekly meetings which provide the mentees a chance to get advice from their mentor, meet each other, and visit laboratories, among other things.  In addition, SWPS sponsors monthly events that serve to introduce the women in the department to each other and highlight issues of importance to women.   Please see the SWPS webpage for more information on this program.

I was a delegate to the IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics held in Paris, France March 6-9, 2002.   This conference has resulted in a worldwide effort to promote women in physics.   The activities of the US delegation are summarized here.

This page was last modified on October 28, 2005 by Kristine Lang.