JILA Postdoctoral Researcher Konstantin Herb Receives Raymond Andrew Prize and SPS Award in Metrology
JILA postdoctoral researcher and Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc.Mobility Fellow Konstantin Herb, a member of JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye鈥檚 research group, has received two major awards for his doctoral research at ETH Zurich: the 2026 Raymond Andrew Prize from Groupement AMPERE and the 2026 Swiss Physical Society Award related to Metrology, sponsored by the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology (METAS).
The Raymond Andrew Prize was presented in June at EUROMAR 2026 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Groupement AMPERE awards the prize annually to a young scientist for an outstanding doctoral thesis in magnetic resonance. The SPS award was presented in August at the society鈥檚 2026 Annual Meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sponsored by METAS, the prize recognizes exceptional research by a physicist early in their career with a strong connection to metrology.
Both honors recognize Herb鈥檚 thesis, 鈥淣itrogen-Vacancy Centers as Versatile Quantum Sensors for Nanoscale Metrology,鈥 completed under the supervision of Professor Christian Degen. His research pushed the temporal and spatial reach of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond as quantum sensors. Herb established a direct connection between the time resolution of a quantum sensor and a fundamental quantum speed limit, then demonstrated magnetic measurements with a record time resolution of approximately one nanosecond. This result revealed the exceptional instantaneous bandwidth available with NV magnetometry and opened new possibilities for studying fast magnetic dynamics at the nanoscale.
Herb also advanced nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance through methods for locating and characterizing individual nuclear spins. In complementary work, diamond surface engineering enabled NMR detection from fewer than 100 molecules, an important step toward structural analysis at the single molecule level. Key results appeared in Physical Review Letters on quantum speed limits and multidimensional spectroscopy, as well as in Nature Communications and Nano Letters.
鈥淚 am deeply honored that this work has been recognized by both the magnetic resonance and metrology communities,鈥 Herb said. 鈥淲hat excites me most is the opportunity to connect fundamental questions in quantum physics with new measurement tools. That perspective now guides my work on nuclear clocks at JILA.鈥
At JILA, Herb is supported by an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship to conduct research on thorium nuclear clocks in Ye鈥檚 group. This work builds on his experience with optically addressable spin systems in solids and extends his research from nanoscale quantum sensing to precision spectroscopy and timekeeping. Nuclear clocks use a transition within the atomic nucleus as a frequency reference. Since nuclear states are comparatively well shielded from environmental disturbances, thorium-229 is a promising system for precision timekeeping and tests of fundamental physics.
