Welcome Tyler Johnson, who joins Yale Physics as a postdoctoral associate, working with the Reina Maruyama group at Wright Lab. He is an experimental physicist who has worked on the axion direct-detection experiments RAY and ALPHA at Yale. Both constitute new approaches to axion searches. His primary focus is on RAY to develop a Rydberg atom-based single photon sensor capable of detecting individual microwave photons with a beam of Rydberg atoms, electron optics, and electron detection.
Johnson grew up in Kansas, then studied at the University of Chicago for his undergraduate degree. He completed his PhD in nuclear physics at Duke University working on the first search for neutrino-induced nuclear fission with the experiment he built and deployed to Oak Ridge National Laboratory called NuThor with the COHERENT Collaboration. That work was funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Consortium on Monitoring, Technology & Verification where he was an Applied Anti-neutrino Physics Doctoral Fellow. This interest in nuclear non-proliferation melded with his work with the Stanford US-Russia Forum as an Arms Control Fellow.