Sean is a staff scientist in the LLNL Quantum Coherent Device Physics group, first joining as a postdoc in 2019. He’s been fixing, improving, and inventing electronic gadgets since he was old enough to hold a pair of DMM probes but never really felt like an expert due to a habit of always moving on to trickier projects and harder problems. He started with HAM radio and custom tracker payloads to locate lost model rockets and aircraft, but chose to study physics over engineering because “How” questions are fun but “Why” questions are amazing. After undergrad at UCSC, he worked as an engineer at Oxford Instruments X-ray and Microwave Power Technology because the “How” economic sector pays better than the “Why” sector. Finding himself in danger of feeling competent in high-voltage design, x-ray imaging, and production engineering, he left to the high ivory towers of modern physics at UC Berkeley, but not before a detour through the low hilly refugee camps of the Thai/Burma border to teach one academic year of physics and electronics to students eager to one day repatriate and rebuild. At Berkeley he became acclimated to some of the coldest, darkest places in the Universe (dilution fridges), designed and built a best-in-the-world (for a little while) microwave amplifier for the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment, and wrote a dissertation he’s still pretty proud of. At LLNL, he wrangles with quantum computing-- a technology that everyone agrees works great on paper, but still needs some figuring out. This is his happy place. He also enjoys scrutinizing fundamental assumptions in physics; most recently he is doubting the nary-questioned theory of Object Permanence due to the frequent disappearance of his 5/16” torque wrench.

Ph.D., Physics, University of California at Berkeley, 2019

B.S. Physics with highest honors, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006

Recent:

Loren D. Alegria, Daniel M. Tennant, Kevin R. Chaves, Jonathan R. I. Lee, Sean R. O'Kelley, Yaniv J. Rosen, Jonathan L. DuBois; Two-level systems in nucleated and non-nucleated epitaxial alpha-tantalum films. Appl. Phys. Lett. 7 August 2023; 123 (6): 062601. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0157654

D.M. Tennant, L.A. Martinez, K.M. Beck, S.R. O’Kelley, C.D. Wilen, R. McDermott, J.L. DuBois, and Y.J. Rosen, “Low-Frequency Correlated Charge-Noise Measurements Across Multiple Energy Transitions in a Tantalum Transmon,” PRX Quantum 3(3), (2022). https://doi.org/10.1103/prxquantum.3.030307

R. Khatiwada, D. Bowring, A.S. Chou, A. Sonnenschein, W. Wester, D.V. Mitchell, T. Braine, C. Bartram, R. Cervantes, N. Crisosto, N. Du, L.J. Rosenberg, G. Rybka, J. Yang, D. Will, S. Kimes, G. Carosi, N. Woollett, S. Durham, L.D. Duffy, R. Bradley, C. Boutan, M. Jones, B.H. LaRoque, N.S. Oblath, M.S. Taubman, J. Tedeschi, J. Clarke, A. Dove, A. Hashim, I. Siddiqi, N. Stevenson, A. Eddins, S.R. O’Kelley, S. Nawaz, A. Agrawal, A.V. Dixit, J.R. Gleason, S. Jois, P. Sikivie, N.S. Sullivan, D.B. Tanner, J.A. Solomon, E. Lentz, E.J. Daw, M.G. Perry, J.H. Buckley, P.M. Harrington, E.A. Henriksen, K.W. Murch, and G.C. Hilton, “Axion Dark Matter Experiment: Detailed design and operations,” Review of Scientific Instruments 92(12), (2021). https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0037857

C. Bartram, T. Braine, R. Cervantes, N. Crisosto, N. Du, G. Leum, L.J. Rosenberg, G. Rybka, J. Yang, D. Bowring, A.S. Chou, R. Khatiwada, A. Sonnenschein, W. Wester, G. Carosi, N. Woollett, L.D. Duffy, M. Goryachev, B. McAllister, M.E. Tobar, C. Boutan, M. Jones, B.H. LaRoque, N.S. Oblath, M.S. Taubman, J. Clarke, A. Dove, A. Eddins, S.R. O’Kelley, S. Nawaz, I. Siddiqi, N. Stevenson, A. Agrawal, A.V. Dixit, J.R. Gleason, S. Jois, P. Sikivie, J.A. Solomon, N.S. Sullivan, D.B. Tanner, E. Lentz, E.J. Daw, M.G. Perry, J.H. Buckley, P.M. Harrington, E.A. Henriksen, and K.W. Murch, “Axion dark matter experiment: Run 1B analysis details,” Phys. Rev. D 103(3), (2021). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.103.032002

Full Record:

ORCiD | Google Scholar

A 2023 interview about quantum computing with comedian JT Parr--  https://youtu.be/Zd0PhjDDfcE