Category Archives: Experimental highlights

Highlighting experimental progress at IQIM.

Jeff Kimble stands tall

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Jeff Kimble played college basketball. I conjecture that he is more than two meters tall, though being a theorist I have never measured him. Jeff certainly stands tall in the Pantheon of outstanding physicists, and we at Quantum Frontiers were thrilled to hear that Jeff has received the 2013 Herbert Walther Award, which is very well deserved.

About four years ago, Jeff gave a public lecture at Caltech about “The Quantum Internet,” and I had the honor of introducing him. The video of Jeff’s lecture and my introduction are embedded at the end of this post. You’ll have to watch the video to hear all the Buddy Holly references in my introduction (Jeff and Buddy come from the same county in Texas). Jeff’s lecture was memorable, too, featuring a dance performance by his research group.

One of my most annoying quirks is that I like to use poems to introduce people, so I wrote one to fit the topic of the lecture. Among many other achievements, Jeff’s group has done pioneering experiments distributing quantum entanglement among multiple nodes in a quantum network, which is probably all you need to know to understand the poem.

Fluorescence image of four laser-cooled atomic ensembles, each used as a quantum node in an entanglement distribution experiment by the Kimble group.

Fluorescence image of four laser-cooled atomic ensembles, each used as a quantum node in an entanglement distribution experiment by the Kimble group.

Listening to one of my poems tends to make the audience uncomfortable (which I’ve been told is a sign that it’s good poetry). But Jeff did not seem to mind the poem too much, so I will seize the opportunity to post it here to commemorate the occasion.

Congratulations, Jeff!

The Quantum Internet

Professor HJ Kimble
Is much larger than a thimble
And a veritable symbol
Of the physicist today.

Could it be prodigious height
Explains his knack for squeezing light
Or is Jeff’s mind extremely bright?
I guess that’s hard to say…

Jeff wants to build a quantum net
It seems quite hard, but still I bet
Someday we’ll get there, just not yet.
There’ll be a slight delay.

At least they’ve made a quantum node,
That’s a start along the road.
They showed a photon could be stowed
And then released. Okay?

Jeff’s students stay up very late
And try to share a quantum state
Between two nodes. But when you wait
Entanglement decays.

Once entanglement is strong
And they can make it last quite long
One node could be inside Hong Kong
The other in Bombay.

And once the quantum net’s begun
We’re going to have a lot of fun
Exploiting work that Jeff has done
Hear what he has to say!

Jeff Kimble wins 2013 Herbert Walther Award

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Prof. Kimble knew Prof. Walther personally and has a profound respect for him and his accomplishments. He is greatly honored by this award.

Prof. Kimble knew Prof. Walther personally and has profound respect for him and his accomplishments. He is greatly honored by this award.

H. Jeff Kimble, William L. Valentine Professor of Physics at Caltech, is the recipient of the 2013 Herbert Walther award. This award is jointly made by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG, the German Physical Society) and the Optical Society of America (OSA), and is presented by each society in alternate years.

The award recognizes Jeff’s “pioneering experimental contributions to quantum optics, cavity quantum electrodynamics, and quantum information science“. Many of the achievements that have taken place in the Kimble group deserve their share of this prize. Among the most impacting ones are the photon antibunching, the demonstration of a quantum phase gate to perform quantum logic operations, nonlinear optics with a single atom strongly coupled to single photons in an optical cavity, the one-atom laser in the regime of strong coupling, a single photon source made by an atom inside a cavity, and entanglement between atomic ensembles.

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Accelerometer: Part I

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This blog has made the terrible decision to ask me to do more regular posts.  Well, before trial and error catches up with me, let’s have some fun together…

As young single Caltech graduate students, we have become accustomed to making hearts race with our science.  We turn measurements and derivations into heart palpitations.  While this has been manifestly obvious for quite some time, we in the Oskar Painter group have recently been interested in quantitatively measuring this effect.  Because, as any good Caltech physics graduate student believes, anything (even sex appeal) is uninteresting unless fully quantified in a dataset.  We set out to make an accelerometer with enough resolution to sense the irregular and skipped heartbeats of our fawning admirers.

What follows is a multi-part treatise on the optomechanical accelerometers we developed.

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Individual quantum systems

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When I went to school in the 20th century, “quantum measurements” in the laboratory were typically performed on ensembles of similarly prepared systems. In the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly routine to perform quantum measurements on single atoms, photons, electrons, or phonons. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes two of the heros who led these revolutionary advances, Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland. Good summaries of their outstanding achievements can be found at the Nobel Prize site, and at Physics Today.

Serge Haroche developed cavity quantum electrodynamics in the microwave regime. Among other impressive accomplishments, his group has performed “nondemolition” measurements of the number of photons stored in a cavity (that is, the photons can be counted without any of the photons being absorbed). The measurement is done by preparing a Rubidium atom in a superposition of two quantum states. As the Rb atom traverses the cavity, the energy splitting of these two states is slightly perturbed by the cavity’s quantized electromagnetic field, resulting in a detectable phase shift that depends on the number of photons present. (Caltech’s Jeff Kimble, the Director of IQIM, has pioneered the development of analogous capabilities for optical photons.)
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Three Questions: Zach Korth, LIGO

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Who are you?

My name is Zach Korth. I’m a graduate student here at Caltech, working in Prof. Rana Adhikari’s group on experimental gravitational wave physics. The bulk of my time goes to developing and testing technology that will be installed at the detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA. Run jointly by Caltech and MIT, LIGO is poised to make the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples of space-time itself propagating across the universe at the speed of light, carrying with them information about the most distant and poorly understood astrophysical phenomena thought to exist.

At the LIGO Hanford control room.


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Supremacy Now?

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Martin Zwierlein

In May 1994, Artur Ekert visited Caltech to give a seminar about quantum cryptography. Near the end of the talk, Ekert revealed an exciting new development — just weeks earlier, Peter Shor had announced the discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of large composite integers, a problem for which no efficient classical algorithm is known.

Perhaps I’ve embellished the memory over time, but I recall being awestruck by this news. I spent the next month at the Isaac Newton Institute attending a workshop about quantum black holes, and though it was a very good workshop and I had some great discussions, I spent most of my time there secretly trying to understand Shor’s paper, which Ekert had emailed to me. This took some effort, because I knew little about algorithms or computational complexity at that time (even less than I know now), but by the end of the workshop I felt I understood the ideas behind Shor’s algorithm pretty well. I did not yet realize that I was in the midst of a career transition from particle physics to quantum information science.
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Closure

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Frank Wilczek

There are two kinds of particle physicists: those who wanted the Higgs boson to be discovered, and those who wanted the Higgs boson not to be discovered.

At a conference last fall, I sat at the same dinner table with Frank Wilczek. Inevitably, the conversation came around to the prospects for discovering the Higgs boson in 2012. “It would be much more exciting if the Higgs isn’t found,” I insisted. Frank did not claim to disagree, but was adamant: “I want closure.”*

In the late fall of 1974, I had applied to graduate school, but did not yet know where I would be accepted. Roberta (then my fiance, now my wife) and I were in Boston for the day, so we decided to stop by Harvard to look around. We noticed Steve Weinberg was in his office, and though I had never met Weinberg and had no appointment, we barged in. I introduced Roberta and announced I was interested in coming to Harvard the following year.
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More to come

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John Wheeler. Photo by the New York Times/Redux.

As a sophomore at Princeton I took a class called Honors Physics from a man named Johnny Wheeler. He wore a suit and tie to class, loved explosions, and created vivid art in real time with colored chalk. Implausibly old, he had worked on nuclear fission with Niels Bohr. He was 61.

The lectures were long on inspiration and short on information about how to do the homework. I was in awe of Wheeler. Some students thought he sucked.

One day I arrived late to find Wheeler conducting a poll. We were voting on the future of science: is there “more to come” or “less to come”? I don’t remember the count, but “more to come” won handily. Wheeler was pleased.

Later, at a student-faculty lunch, Wheeler seemed troubled. He had been asked to explain the essence of quantum mechanics in five words or less, and was stumped. Frank Calaprice, a nuclear physicist within earshot, interjected helpfully, “What we expect to measure?” I was silent.

The question was absurd. It was fascinating. I still think about it. I can’t answer it.

This year I taught a course on quantum statistical physics to Caltech sophomores. I wore khakis and always used the white chalk. Though I’m 59, few students seemed awed. Some thought I sucked. Maybe I did sometimes.

Johnny Wheeler never blogged. If he had, some readers would have been awed. Some would have thought he sucked.

But Johnny would not have reminisced about a class he took 40 years ago. He knew there was more to come.

Welcome to Quantum Frontiers! We hope that the posts to come will be long on inspiration, even if short on information about how to do your homework. Enjoy!