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Bio

Dr. Jack Sankey joined the McGill Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2012. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the Cornell University Physics Department (Dan Ralph Group) for his work on spin transfer in individual nanomagnets, and switched to the field of optomechanics for his postdoc in the Yale Physics Department (Jack Harris Group).

At McGill he continues to pursue both optomechanics and spin transfer. In optomechanics, he is interested in engineering new types of micromechanical force sensors controlled by laser light, potentially operating in the limit where quantum mechanics plays a dominant role. Notably, the mechanical elements fabricated by his group hold the world record for room-temperature force sensitivity and are compatible with optical cavities in which light at the level of a single photon will change the mechanical damping parameter by a factor of ~8, thereby profoundly altering its trajectory. Additionally, his group recently proposed a previously undiscussed type of optomechanical coupling in which light will be strongly coupled to the shape and effective mass of a mechanical mode. This adds a third and fourth fundamental mechanical “knob” that can be tuned with light (in addition to frequency and damping).

Dr. Sankey currently holds a Tier-II Canada Research Chair in Experimental Optomechanics, and was awarded a 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for promising early-career researchers.

Research Interests

• Diamond Quantum Optics
• Quantum Optomechanics
• Dark-Matter Mechanical Sensing
• Quantum-Limited Medical Sensing