Moving into the Ginsburg Center
June 3, 2026
The Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement, seen from across California Boulevard. Rendering: HOK / Caltech.
The most sensitive parts of our experiments are at war with their surroundings: a truck on California Boulevard, the building’s air handlers, a stray magnetic field, a degree of temperature drift overnight. We spend a great deal of effort fighting those disturbances with isolation stacks, shielding, and feedback loops. This summer, much of that fight gets easier.
Caltech is opening the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement — a 70,000-square-foot building designed, quite literally, from the ground down for this kind of measurement. Its seven laboratories sit 28 feet below grade on a single three-foot-thick concrete slab to damp ground motion, with temperature held to within a tenth of a degree and the electromagnetic environment kept quiet. These are the conditions that set the noise floor for coating thermal-noise measurements, quantum squeezing, and precision optomechanics — so the building is, in effect, part of the apparatus.
The building’s transparent corner. Caltech describes its inflection points as a nod to “the exquisite manipulation of light inside the building’s laboratories.” Rendering: HOK / Caltech.
The Center is also the first at Caltech to bring precision measurement, quantum information, and gravitational-wave detection under one roof — the three threads that run through our group’s work. We’ll share the building with colleagues across all of them.
Courtyard and rooftop terrace. Rendering: HOK / Caltech.
What’s moving: nearly all of our experimental laboratories and all of our group offices. The one exception is the 40-meter prototype interferometer — a large, fixed facility that stays in its current home and keeps running.
The ribbon-cutting date and our new room numbers will follow.