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Michelle Stephens (Fed)

Physicist

Michelle Stephens is the group lead for the Sources and Detectors Group at NIST.

Dr. Stephens received a B.S. and a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT. For her graduate work she developed seismic isolation systems for laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors. After a postdoc at JILA, studying efficient laser cooling and trapping of Cs and Rb, she joined the Time and Frequency Division at NIST. After two years, she moved to a high-tech start-up company. The company failed after a year, but that was the beginning of an 18-year career in industry. She worked 5 years in R&D and metrology at Research Electro-Optics, a manufacturer of precision optics, and 12 years at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation as an instrument systems engineer on several technology development efforts and Earth remote sensing instrument missions. She returned to NIST in 2015.

Publications

Single Photon Detectors and Metrology

Author(s)
Sonia Buckley, Michelle Stephens, John H. Lehman
For quantum applications, it is important to generate quantum states of light and detect them with extremely high efficiency. For future applications, it also

Patents (2018-Present)

A disk-shaped device is smaller than the half-dollar coin underneath it.

Smart Mirror

NIST Inventors
Alexandra (Aly) Artusio-Glimpse , John H. Lehman , Michelle Stephens , Nathan A Tomlin and Paul A. Williams
Radiation pressure is a force that results when light reflects from a mirror. By measuring the force on a mirror, the power in a laser beam can be assessed. We have invented a miniaturized mirrored force sensor that combines several key elements to make a sensor that is smaller, faster, more
Created March 26, 2019, Updated June 20, 2024