People


Onur Hosten (Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor) / since 1. June 2018

Onur received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Paul Kwiat. He was a postdoctoral scholar and then a staff scientist at Stanford University in the group of Mark Kasevich. He joined IST Austria as an Assistant Professor in 2018, starting the experimental group ‘Quantum Sensing with atoms and Light’.

Career
since 2018 Assistant Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2015 – 2017 Research Associate, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA
2010 – 2015 Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University , Palo Alto, USA
2010 PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Link to CV


Fritz Diorico (Postdoc) / since 15. July 2018

Fritz joined the group just a month after its formation at ISTA. He did his PhD on combining cold atoms and superconducting circuits at the TU Vienna in Joerg Schmiedmayer’s group. He obtained his MSc in Photonics in Belgium and Scotland under the Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Contrary to his German name, Fritz grew up in the Philippines and has no German or Austrian blood connection.


Vyacheslav Li (PhD student) / since 15. September 2018

Vyacheslav received his Bachelor’s degree from Nazarbayev University, Astana. He wrote his thesis on Brillouin Scattering for probing elastic properties of matter under the supervision of Zhandos Utegulov. In 2018 Vyacheslav joined Hosten group as a PhD student. His current work is mostly focused on improving technologies for precision measurements such as magnetic field stabilization or laser frequency offset stabilization.


Sebastian Wald (PhD student) / since 15. September 2019

Sebastian joined the group in 2019 to work on a project, where we want to realize an entanglement enhanced atom interferometer with spatially squeezed states. Previously he received his MSc in Physics at TU Wien in 2017. For his Master’s thesis, he joined the group of Jörg Schmiedmayer to investigate the longitudinal relaxation of NV electron spin ensembles at cryogenic temperatures under the supervision of Johannes Majer.


Sofia Agafonova (PhD student) / since 1. August 2021

Sofia came to ISTA from Russia where she did her bachelor and master thesis at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Both works were devoted to compact sources of frequency combs based on optical microresonators. In Onur’s group, Sofia works in the field of quantum optomechanics where she designs, builds and characterizes mechanical pendulums, and (hopefully) brings them to the quantum regime and use them in sensing applications.


Umang Mishra (PhD student) / since 1. August 2022

Umang completed his undergraduate studies in Physics from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2021. His undergraduate thesis was on the development of a multilayer dielectric haloscope experiment for dark matter detection under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Arneodo. As part of the Hosten Lab, Umang will be working alongside Sofia on optomechanical cooling of milligram scale torsional pendulums and their applications in tests for fundamental physics. 


Edward-Fulbright Gheorghita (PhD student) / since 1. August 2023

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