Philip Schmidt was member of the Gross group at WMI as a Master and Ph.D. Student between 2014 and 2019.

Master Thesis: Inductive Switchable Cavity Electromechanics (June 2015)
Ph.D. Thesis: Nanomechanical Quantum Systems (February 2020)

In his Ph.D. thesis, Philip Schmidt was working on inductively coupled nanomechanical quantum systems and cavity electromechanics. Optomechanical systems allow for the study of quantum mechanics in the literal sense. However, they often suffer from a low photon-phonon coupling rate. Coupling rates exceeding those of capacitive coupling schemes are predicted for inductive ones. By using Josephson junctions as lossless nonlinear inductors the vacuum strong-coupling regime should be accessible. Philp Schmidt designed, fabricated and characterized such inductively coupled electromechanical systems. He reached a record coupling strength of 1.6 kHz, paving the way towards quantum devices operating on a single photon-single phonon level.  

He left WMI in 2020 to join the Aspelmayer group at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at Vienna as a postdoctoral researcher.