Willis E. Lamb, Jr
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Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics 29 July - 3 August 2013, Prague, Czech Republic
Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics 29 July - 3 August 2013, Prague, Czech Republic Under the auspicies of Ing. Milosˇ Zeman President of the Czech Republic Milan Stˇ echˇ President of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic Prof. Ing. Jirˇ´ı Drahos,ˇ DrSc., dr. h. c. President of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Dominik Cardinal Duka OP Archbishop of Prague Supported by • Committee on Education, Science, Culture, Human Rights and Petitions of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic • Institute of Physics, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic • Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands • Department of Physics, Texas A&M University, USA • Institut de Physique Theorique,´ CEA/CNRS Saclay, France Topics • Foundations of quantum physics • Non-equilibrium statistical physics • Quantum thermodynamics • Quantum measurement, entanglement and coherence • Dissipation, dephasing, noise and decoherence • Quantum optics • Macroscopic quantum behavior, e.g., cold atoms, Bose-Einstein condensates • Physics of quantum computing and quantum information • Mesoscopic, nano-electromechanical and nano-optical systems • Biological systems, molecular motors • Cosmology, gravitation and astrophysics Scientific Committee Chair: Theo M. Nieuwenhuizen (University of Amsterdam) Co-Chair: Vaclav´ Spiˇ ckaˇ (Institute of Physics, Acad. Sci. CR, Prague) Raymond Dean Astumian (University of Maine, Orono) Roger Balian (IPhT, Saclay) Gordon Baym (University of Illinois at Urbana -
Charles Hard Townes (1915–2015)
ARTICLE-IN-A-BOX Charles Hard Townes (1915–2015) C H Townes shared the Nobel Prize in 1964 for the concept of the laser and the earlier realization of the concept at microwave frequencies, called the maser. He passed away in January of this year, six months short of his hundredth birthday. A cursory look at the archives shows a paper as late as 2011 – ‘The Dust Distribution Immediately Surrounding V Hydrae’, a contribution to infrared astronomy. To get a feel for the range in time and field, his 1936 masters thesis was based on repairing a non-functional van de Graaf accelerator at Duke University in 1936! For his PhD at the California Institute of Technology, he measured the spin of the nucleus of carbon-13 using isotope separation and high resolution spectroscopy. Smythe, his thesis supervisor was writing a comprehensive text on electromagnetism, and Townes solved every problem in it – it must have stood him in good stead in what followed. In 1939, even a star student like him did not get an academic job. The industrial job he took set him on his lifetime course. This was at the legendary Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research wing of AT&T, the company which set up and ran the first – and then the best – telephone system in the world. He was initially given a lot of freedom to work with different research groups. During the Second World War, he worked in a group developing a radar based system for guiding bombs. But his goal was always physics research. After the War, Bell Labs, somewhat reluctantly, let him pursue microwave spectroscopy, on the basis of a technical report he wrote suggesting that molecules might serve as circuit elements at high frequencies which were important for communication. -
From Theory to the First Working Laser Laser History—Part I
I feature_ laser history From theory to the first working laser Laser history—Part I Author_Ingmar Ingenegeren, Germany _The principle of both maser (microwave am- 19 US patents) using a ruby laser. Both were nom- plification by stimulated emission of radiation) inated for the Nobel Prize. Gábor received the 1971 and laser (light amplification by stimulated emis- Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention and devel- sion of radiation) were first described in 1917 by opment of the holographic method. To a friend he Albert Einstein (Fig.1) in “Zur Quantentheorie der wrote that he was ashamed to get this prize for Strahlung”, as the so called ‘stimulated emission’, such a simple invention. He was the owner of more based on Niels Bohr’s quantum theory, postulated than a hundred patents. in 1913, which explains the actions of electrons in- side atoms. Einstein (born in Germany, 14 March In 1954 at the Columbia University in New York, 1879–18 April 1955) received the Nobel Prize for Charles Townes (born in the USA, 28 July 1915–to- physics in 1921, and Bohr (born in Denmark, 7 Oc- day, Fig. 2) and Arthur Schawlow (born in the USA, tober 1885–18 November 1962) in 1922. 5 Mai 1921–28 April 1999, Fig. 3) invented the maser, using ammonia gas and microwaves which In 1947 Dennis Gábor (born in Hungarian, 5 led to the granting of a patent on March 24, 1959. June 1900–8 February 1972) developed the theory The maser was used to amplify radio signals and as of holography, which requires laser light for its re- an ultra sensitive detector for space research. -
Wolfgang Pauli Niels Bohr Paul Dirac Max Planck Richard Feynman
Wolfgang Pauli Niels Bohr Paul Dirac Max Planck Richard Feynman Louis de Broglie Norman Ramsey Willis Lamb Otto Stern Werner Heisenberg Walther Gerlach Ernest Rutherford Satyendranath Bose Max Born Erwin Schrödinger Eugene Wigner Arnold Sommerfeld Julian Schwinger David Bohm Enrico Fermi Albert Einstein Where discovery meets practice Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology IQ ST in Baden-Württemberg . Introduction “But I do not wish to be forced into abandoning strict These two quotes by Albert Einstein not only express his well more securely, develop new types of computer or construct highly causality without having defended it quite differently known aversion to quantum theory, they also come from two quite accurate measuring equipment. than I have so far. The idea that an electron exposed to a different periods of his life. The first is from a letter dated 19 April Thus quantum theory extends beyond the field of physics into other 1924 to Max Born regarding the latter’s statistical interpretation of areas, e.g. mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and even biology. beam freely chooses the moment and direction in which quantum mechanics. The second is from Einstein’s last lecture as Let us look at a few examples which illustrate this. The field of crypt it wants to move is unbearable to me. If that is the case, part of a series of classes by the American physicist John Archibald ography uses number theory, which constitutes a subdiscipline of then I would rather be a cobbler or a casino employee Wheeler in 1954 at Princeton. pure mathematics. Producing a quantum computer with new types than a physicist.” The realization that, in the quantum world, objects only exist when of gates on the basis of the superposition principle from quantum they are measured – and this is what is behind the moon/mouse mechanics requires the involvement of engineering. -
Turning Point in the Development of Quantum Mechanics and the Early Years of the Mossbauer Effect*
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory FERMILAB-Conf-76/87-THY October 1976 A TURNING POINT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF QUANTUM MECHANICS AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE MOSSBAUER EFFECT* Harry J. Lipkin' Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60^39 Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory"; Batavia, Illinois 60S10 It is interesting to hear about the exciting early days recalled by Professors Wigner and Wick. I learned quantum theory at a later period, which might be called a turning point in its development, when the general attitude toward quantum mechanics and the study of physics was very different from what it is today. As an undergraduate student in electrical engineering in 19^0 in the United States I found a certain disagreement between the faculty and the students about the "relevance'- of the curriculum. Students thought a k-year course in electrical engineering should include more electronics than a one-semester 3-hour course. But the establishment emphasized the study of power machinery and power transmission because 95'/° of their graduates would eventually get jobs in power. Electronics, they said, was fun for students who were radio hams but useless on the job market. Students at that time did not have today's attitudes and did not stage massive demonstrations and protests against the curriculum. Instead a few of us who wished to learn more interesting things satisfied all the requirements of the engineering school and spent as much extra time as possible listening to fascinating courses in the physics building. There we had the opportunity to listen to two recently-arrived Europeans, Bruno Rossi and Hans Bethe. -
Laser Spectroscopy to Resolve Hyperfine Structure of Rubidium
Laser spectroscopy to resolve hyperfine structure of rubidium Hannah Saddler, Adam Egbert, and Will Weigand (Dated: 12 November 2015) This experiment had two main goals: to create an absorption spectrum for rubidium using the technique of absorption spectroscopy and to resolve the hyperfine structures for the two rubidium isotopes using saturation absorption spectroscopy. The absorption spectrum was used to determine the frequency difference between the ground state and first excited state for both isotopes. The calculated frequency difference was 6950 MHz ± 90 MHz for rubidium 87 and 3060 MHz ± 60 MHz for rubidium 85. Both values agree with the literature values. The hyperfine structure for rubidium 87 was able to be resolved using this experimental setup. The energy differences were determined to be 260 MHz ± 10 MHz and 150 MHz ± 10 Mhz MHz. The hyperfine structure for rubidium 85 was unable to be resolved using this experimental setup. Additionally the theory of doppler broadening was used to make measurements of the full width half maximum. These values were used to calculate a temperature of 310K ± 40 K which makes sense because the experiments were performed at room temperature. I. INTRODUCTION in the theory section and how they were manipulated and used to derive the results from the recorded data. Addi- tionally there is an explanation of experimental error and The era of modern spectroscopy began with the in- uncertainty associated the results. Section V is a conclu- vention of the laser. The word laser was originally an sion that ties the results of the experiment we performed acronym that stood for light amplification by stimulated to the usefulness of the technique of laser spectroscopy. -
Laser Spectroscopy Experiments
Hyperfine Spectrum of Rubidium: laser spectroscopy experiments Physics 480W (Dated: Sp19 Paper #4) I. OBJECTIVES FOR THESE EXPERIMENTS We wish to use the technique of absorption spec- troscopy to probe and detect the energy level structure of atomic Rubidium, Rb I, whose ground state is split by a tiny amount on account of nuclear magnetism. In effect, the spectroscopy we do today tells us about nuclear prop- erties and so combines atomic and nuclear physics. The main result of this experiment, the 4th of the semester, is to 1. measure the hyperfine splitting for each isotope, and compare with accepted values, with the fol- lowing details in mind: (a) what is the hyperfine splitting of the ground 2 state, S1=2 term? Do we need saturation- absorption techniques for this? (b) what are the hyperfine splittings of the ex- 2 cited state, P3=2 term, that can be reached with a nominal wavelength of 780nm from the ground state? Here we need saturation- absorption techniques to perform sub-Doppler FIG. 1. Note the four 'blobs'. Why are there four? Which spectroscopy, certainly. Help the reader un- 85 are associated with Rb37, and so on. If all goes swimm- derstand what is entailed in the technique, ingly, we'll get an absorption spectrum that looks much line both experimentally and theoretically. You the figure below the setup. The etalon data will be needed to will need to explain what `saturation' means. make the abscissa something proportional to frequency. The The saturation intensity is an important fig- accepted value of the gap between the 2 outermost dips is ure of merit. -
Delayed-Choice Gedanken Experiments and Their Realizations
REVIEWS OF MODERN PHYSICS, VOLUME 88, JANUARY–MARCH 2016 Delayed-choice gedanken experiments and their realizations Xiao-song Ma* Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Vienna, Austria, Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, 15 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA, and National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics, Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China † Johannes Kofler Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), Hans-Kopfermann-Straße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany ‡ Anton Zeilinger Vienna Center of Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ), University of Vienna, Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090 Vienna, Austria and Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Vienna, Austria (published 3 March 2016) The wave-particle duality dates back to Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect through quanta of light and de Broglie’s hypothesis of matter waves. Quantum mechanics uses an abstract description for the behavior of physical systems such as photons, electrons, or atoms. Whether quantum predictions for single systems in an interferometric experiment allow an intuitive under- standing in terms of the particle or wave picture depends on the specific configuration which is being used. In principle, this leaves open the possibility that quantum systems always behave either definitely as a particle or definitely as a wave in every experimental run by a priori adapting to the specific experimental situation. This is precisely what is tried to be excluded by delayed-choice experiments, in which the observer chooses to reveal the particle or wave character of a quantum system—or even a continuous transformation between the two—at a late stage of the experiment. -
The Concept of the Photon—Revisited
The concept of the photon—revisited Ashok Muthukrishnan,1 Marlan O. Scully,1,2 and M. Suhail Zubairy1,3 1Institute for Quantum Studies and Department of Physics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843 2Departments of Chemistry and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 3Department of Electronics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan The photon concept is one of the most debated issues in the history of physical science. Some thirty years ago, we published an article in Physics Today entitled “The Concept of the Photon,”1 in which we described the “photon” as a classical electromagnetic field plus the fluctuations associated with the vacuum. However, subsequent developments required us to envision the photon as an intrinsically quantum mechanical entity, whose basic physics is much deeper than can be explained by the simple ‘classical wave plus vacuum fluctuations’ picture. These ideas and the extensions of our conceptual understanding are discussed in detail in our recent quantum optics book.2 In this article we revisit the photon concept based on examples from these sources and more. © 2003 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 270.0270, 260.0260. he “photon” is a quintessentially twentieth-century con- on are vacuum fluctuations (as in our earlier article1), and as- Tcept, intimately tied to the birth of quantum mechanics pects of many-particle correlations (as in our recent book2). and quantum electrodynamics. However, the root of the idea Examples of the first are spontaneous emission, Lamb shift, may be said to be much older, as old as the historical debate and the scattering of atoms off the vacuum field at the en- on the nature of light itself – whether it is a wave or a particle trance to a micromaser. -
Works of Love
reader.ad section 9/21/05 12:38 PM Page 2 AMAZING LIGHT: Visions for Discovery AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF THE 90TH BIRTHDAY YEAR OF CHARLES TOWNES October 6-8, 2005 — University of California, Berkeley Amazing Light Symposium and Gala Celebration c/o Metanexus Institute 3624 Market Street, Suite 301, Philadelphia, PA 19104 215.789.2200, [email protected] www.foundationalquestions.net/townes Saturday, October 8, 2005 We explore. What path to explore is important, as well as what we notice along the path. And there are always unturned stones along even well-trod paths. Discovery awaits those who spot and take the trouble to turn the stones. -- Charles H. Townes Table of Contents Table of Contents.............................................................................................................. 3 Welcome Letter................................................................................................................. 5 Conference Supporters and Organizers ............................................................................ 7 Sponsors.......................................................................................................................... 13 Program Agenda ............................................................................................................. 29 Amazing Light Young Scholars Competition................................................................. 37 Amazing Light Laser Challenge Website Competition.................................................. 41 Foundational -
Highlights APS March Meeting Heads North to Montréal
December 2003 Volume 12, No. 11 NEWS http://www.physics2005.org A Publication of The American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/apsnews APS March Meeting Heads North to Montréal California Physics Departments Face More The 2004 March Meeting will Physics; International Physics; Edu- be organizing a host of special For those who want to Budget Cuts in an be held in lively and cosmopolitan cation and Physics; and Graduate events, including receptions, explore, there will be tours of Uncertain Future Montréal, Canada’s second largest Student Affairs, as well as topical alumni reunions, a students’ Montréal, highlighting the city’s city. The meeting runs from March groups on Instrument and Mea- lunch with the experts, and an history, cultural heritage, cosmo- The California recall election 22nd through the 26th at the surement Science; Magnetism and opportunity to meet the editors politan nature, and European was a laughing matter to many, Palais des Congrès de Montréal. Its Applications; Shock Compres- of the APS and AIP journals. flavor. a veritable circus of replace- Approximately 5,500 papers sion of Condensed Matter; and ment candidates of dubious will be presented in more than 90 Statistical and Nonlinear Physics. celebrity and questionable invited sessions and 550 contrib- An exhibit show will round out APS Honors Two Undergrads qualifications for the job. But for uted sessions in a wide variety of the program during which attend- physics departments across the categories, including condensed ees can visit vendors who will be With Apker Award state, the ongoing budget woes matter, materials, polymer physics, displaying the latest products, that spurred angry voters to chemical physics, biological phys- instruments and equipment, and Peter Onyisi of the University action in the first place remain ics, fluid dynamics, laser science, software, as well as scientific pub- of Chicago received the award deadly serious. -
Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics 14 - 20 July 2019, Prague, Czech Republic
Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics 14 - 20 July 2019, Prague, Czech Republic Under the auspicies of Ing. Miloš Zeman President of the Czech Republic Jaroslav Kubera President of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic Milan Štˇech Vice-President of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic Prof. RNDr. Eva Zažímalová, CSc. President of the Czech Academy of Sciences Dominik Cardinal Duka OP Archbishop of Prague Supported by • Committee on Education, Science, Culture, Human Rights and Petitions of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic • Institute of Physics, the Czech Academy of Sciences • Department of Physics, Texas A&M University, USA • Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands • College of Engineering and Science, University of Detroit Mercy, USA • Quantum Optics Lab at the BRIC, Baylor University, USA • Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA/CNRS Saclay, France Topics • Non-equilibrium quantum phenomena • Foundations of quantum physics • Quantum measurement, entanglement and coherence • Dissipation, dephasing, noise and decoherence • Many body physics, quantum field theory • Quantum statistical physics and thermodynamics • Quantum optics • Quantum simulations • Physics of quantum information and computing • Topological states of quantum matter, quantum phase transitions • Macroscopic quantum behavior • Cold atoms and molecules, Bose-Einstein condensates • Mesoscopic, nano-electromechanical and nano-optical systems • Biological systems, molecular motors and