Category Archives: News

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Fundamental Physics Prize Prediction: Polyakov

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Rushing to produce a congratulatory post for Stephen Hawking yesterday, I didn’t mention the other big news regarding the Fundamental Physics Prize. Joe Polchinski, Sasha Polyakov, Charlie Kane, Laurens Molenkamp, and Shoucheng Zhang have received the 2013 Physics Frontiers Prize, making them eligible for the Fundamental Physics Prize to be announced on March 20. The New Horizon in Physics Prize (for young physicists) has been awarded to Niklas Beisert, Davide Gaiotto, and Zohar Komargodski. And another “special” $3M Prize, shared by seven people, appropriately recognizes the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The selection committee did a good job.

Joe Polchinski

Joe Polchinski

Joe Polchinski was a Caltech undergrad, class of 1975 (before my time here). I first met Joe in 1982 when he arrived as a postdoc at Harvard, where I was then on the faculty, and it did not take long for me to recognize his genius. I was teaching a course that fall on advanced quantum field theory, and Joe sat in, at least for a while. One of my lectures was about renormalizability, and I talked about how the renormalization group can organize and simplify the horrible combinatoric task of taming the overlapping divergences in Feynman diagrams to all orders of perturbation theory. I had learned this idea from Curt Callan‘s wonderful 1975 Les Houches Summer School Lectures.
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Stephen Hawking wins $3M Milner Prize

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The official announcement won’t come until tomorrow, but The New York Times is reporting that Stephen Hawking will receive a “special” $3M Prize from Yuri Milner’s Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation.

This is fantastic news! I assume the Prize recognizes Stephen’s great discovery that black holes radiate, one of the most transformative developments in theoretical physics during my lifetime. That’s just one of Stephen’s many important contributions. And of course his supreme skill as a popularizer and the unparalleled courage he displays in response to his disability have made him the most famous living scientist in the world. Congratulations, Stephen!

Stephen has a long-standing relationship with Caltech. He spent a sabbatical year here during 1974-75, when he wrote his famous paper formulating the black hole information paradox, and he has made more or less annual extended visits to Caltech since the 1990s. Stephen and I had many memorable discussions about black holes over the years, culminating when he conceded a bet, for which I received far more attention than I deserved. I’ve been proud to be Stephen’s friend for the past 30 years, and we’ve shared a lot of laughter.

With Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking, 2005.

With Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking, 2005.


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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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The TV Frontier

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Hello, my name is Tim Blasius and I am a physics graduate student at Caltech.  I recently appeared in a comedy bit on the TV show Conan, where I corrected Conan O’Brien’s physics.  I have been asked to share a few words describing this experience.

As with any story involving unbridled success, it begins as a tale of unnoticed, under-appreciated  and nearly unending hard work – I usually watch the show Conan during dinner with my fiancé.  Accordingly, I have seen many segments called “fan corrections” where Conan viewers submit YouTube videos explaining mistakes that they believe Conan has made on the show.  Some are nerdy and funny like the one where viewers pointed out that Conan used a red-tailed hawk call instead of a bald eagle call.  I was like a crocodile lurking in the water waiting for Conan to make a mistake in my expertise.  Then, like a woefully ignorant antelope sipping from the river Nile, Conan made a physics mistake when mocking Felix Baumgartner’s free fall, and I, being the bloodthirsty physics predator that I am, snapped the jaws of immutable truth around his naïve self.

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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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Alesha

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An excerpt from my notes (including a misspelling of “repetition”) taken at Alexei Kitaev’s seminar during his first visit to Caltech in 1997. That was a very exciting day.

In 1997, I had some disposable funding as part of a quantum computing project, and decided to seize the opportunity to bring an interesting visitor to Caltech. But whom to invite? Chris Fuchs, then a postdoc at Caltech who seemed to know everybody working on quantum computing, reported that Richard Jozsa, while attending a conference in Japan, had met a remarkable Russian from the Landau Institute named Alexei Kitaev.
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Kitaev wins $3M Physics Prize

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Alexei is thinking of putting some of the award money into education efforts. “My success is in large part due to good education, my teachers and the atmosphere of excitement in science when I grew up,” he is quoted as saying to the New York Times.

Alexei Kitaev, Professor of Physics, Computer Science, and Mathematics at Caltech, has received the Fundamental Physics Prize. This prize, which is being awarded for the first time, was established by Internet billionaire and one-time particle theorist Yuri Milner. The prize citation recognizes Kitaev’s “theoretical idea of implementing robust quantum memories and fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological quantum phases with anyons and unpaired Majorana modes.” As one of nine recipients, he will receive three million dollars.

Kitaev’s 1997 paper on Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons proposed exploiting exotic two-dimensional quantum states of matter for robust storage and processing of quantum information. Later, in the 2000 paper Unpaired Majorana fermions in quantum wires, he made a more concrete proposal to store quantum information robustly in suitably configured one-dimensional systems. The key insight behind both proposals is that when a quantum state is distributed non-locally among many elementary objects, it can be well protected from damage due to uncontrolled interactions with its environment. Kitaev’s ideas are now being vigorously pursued by theorists and experimentalists around the world, and in particular by researchers here at the IQIM.

Concerning the monetary value of the award, Milner explained: “I wanted to send a message that fundamental science is important, so the sum had to be significant.”

Congratulations Alexei!

Sad about Sally

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Sally Ride

I’m really sad about the death of Sally Ride. Aside from all her other achievements, she devoted herself to getting kids, especially girls, excited about math, science and technology. She was 61.

On April 28, 1994 (yes, I really know the date … I keep records), Sally spoke at the Caltech physics colloquium about the future of the US Space Program, and in particular about the case for building the International Space Station. The talk was remarkably frank about how ill suited the Space Station would be for scientific research.

My daughter Carina was 8, and I took her to Caltech after school to meet Sally. Carina brought her copy of Sally’s book To Space and Back, which Sally signed, “To Carina, Reach for the Stars! – Sally Ride”
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Hello quantum world!

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Welcome to a new blog by the licensed quantum mechanics here at IQIM, the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech!

Caltech in bloom. Photo by Lance Hayashida.

IQIM is the newest Physics Frontiers Center supported by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. We study physical systems in which the weirdness of the quantum world becomes manifest on macroscopic scales. Our work spans a wide range of cutting edge research, from superconductivity and nanotechnology, to exotic phases of matter and quantum computation!

We are excited to bring you firsthand accounts of the groundbreaking research taking place inside the labs of IQIM, and to answer your questions about our past, present and future work on some of the most fascinating questions at the frontiers of quantum science.

We hope you will join us on this incredible journey of discovery!