Zeeshan Ahmed

Associate Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Zeeshan Ahmed

Portrait by Lori White

I build ultra-low-noise superconducting detectors and the readout systems that make them usable at scale, and I use them to ask what happened in the first instant of the Universe and how cosmic structure grew afterward.

Each dip is one channel. Reading thousands of them on a single coaxial line makes large detector arrays possible.

I am CMB department head in SLAC’s Fundamental Physics Directorate. I lead DOE’s BICEP Array Upgrade Project in collaboration with NSF. I built the detector readout electronics for the Simons Observatory. I lead the photon sensors project in Q-NEXT’s Sensors for Entanglement thrust.

CV · ORCID · Google Scholar · INSPIRE-HEP

What I work on

The first instant

Inflation predicts a background of primordial gravitational waves. The South Pole Observatory, combining BICEP Array and SPT-3G+, is searching for their imprint on CMB polarization with a target sensitivity of σ(r) = 0.001.

How structure grew

Gravitational lensing of the CMB maps all the matter between us and the last scattering surface. Additionally, the Sunyaev Zeldovich (SZ) effect tracks the pressure and momentum of electrons. The Simons Observatory’s rich wide-field data helps us map these effects to understand how structure formed.

Sensing at the quantum limit

Microwave SQUID multiplexing and the SMuRF electronics read out 98,000 superconducting sensors at once. The same capability now serves quantum networking and dark matter searches.

Recent

  • August 2026 The South Pole Observatory: A Combined Inflation Search Program Targeting σ(r) ∼ 0.001 New Frontiers in Cosmology, A Coruña
  • July 2026 From CMB to Qubits: Shared Frontiers in Superconducting Sensing CECI Workshop on Detector Science, UC Riverside
  • May 2026 SMuRF and SPECTRA: Scalable Warm Electronics for Superconducting Dark Matter Sensors Superconducting Technologies for Dark Matter 2026, Sapienza University of Rome
  • March 2026 Updates from the BICEP inflation search program Rencontres de Moriond, Cosmology
  • September 2025 SLAC’s Detector Microfabrication Facility completed construction and entered operations Devices for cosmology and quantum sensing are now fabricated there