News

David Hsieh, Assistant Professor of Physics, was honored with the 2013 William L. McMillan Award. Hsieh was recognized "for studies of topological insulators and their surface states using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and measurements of the helical spin texture of these novel electronic states." This award was established by McMillan's friends and colleagues at the University of Illinois to recognize outstanding contributions by a young condensed matter physicist. 03.13.13

Our first outreach film is now posted online! Watch the short film introducing some of the IQIM scientists on the IQIM Outreach page. Read a blog post by director Iram Parveen Bilal on Quantum Frontiers to learn more about the film, the ideas behind it, and the scientists who participated. 03.08.13

John Preskill's colleagues, friends, and many former and current postdocs and students are celebrating his work (and 60th birthday) with the conference: From Monopoles to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation, March 14-16 at Caltech. Conference attendance is open to all who register to attend [link to registration website]. A conference banquet on March 15 is by invitation only.03.07.13

Congratulations to graduate student, Jeongwaah Haah, who received the MIT Pappalardo Fellowship! This highly competitive prize does not accept applications. Candidates must be nominated by faculty or senior researchers. Haah has been working with John Preskill on Quantum Information Theory. [More on the MIT web site]02.14.13

IQIM was a co-sponsor of the TEDxYouth day held on January 19. Over 800 local students grades 6 through 12 participated in a TED-style conference. A significant part of the conference is to record talks by video and continue to share and discuss the ideas. See the first series of talks now online [Watch the TEDxYouth@Caltech videos] 02.12.13

Andei Faraon working along with a team of researchers has begun laying the groundwork for an on-chip optical quantum network. They developed a device involving a tiny ring resonator and a tunnel-like optical waveguide, each only a few hundred nanometers wide. Within the resonator lies a nitrogen-vacancy center (NV center) which is photoluminescent. These NV centers are like the building blocks of the network, and we need to make them interact—like having an electrical current connecting one transistor to another," explains Faraon. [Read the paper] [Read the full article in Caltech News] 02.07.13

New Physics faculty, Jason Alicea, discusses his circuitous path to physicis and his current work toward developing the physics behind a quantum computer. Working with collaborators Gil Refael and Matthew Fisher, they look forward to "combining traditional conventional materials that are already available on people's shelves—to design a device that's capable of performing bona fide universal quantum computation without decoherence. We don't know how to do that, but we've made some small steps in that direction fairly recently. That's what I'm most excited about right now." [Read the full article introducing Jason Alicea] 12.18.12

SURF students compete in semi-final round of Perpall Speaking Competition. Mohit Tiwari, mentored by John Preskill and Spyridon Michalakis and John C. Napp, mentored by John Preskill will present the results of their Summer 2012 undergraduate research project as they compete to win a speaking prize of up to $1,000. Winners of this round will advance to the finals held in January. [Abstracts of their initial talks are listed here].11.14.12

Jeff Kimble, William L. Valentine Professor and Professor of Physics, is the 2013 recipient of the Herbert Walther Award, which is jointly made by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) and the Optical Society of America (OSA). Kimble is being recognized For pioneering experimental contributions to quantum optics, cavity quantum electrodynamics, and quantum information science. With his pioneering works over the last 30 years Jeff Kimble had a major impact in the experimental and theoretical physics of the above mentioned fields. Among his scientific breakthroughs are the photon-antibunching, the demonstration of a quantum phase gate for quantum logics, works in the field of non-linear optics for single atoms, single-atom laser in the strong coupling regime, single-photon sources and the entanglement between atomic ensembles. Moreover he contributed significantly to the squeezing of light which helps to overcome quantum limits of precision measurements, to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, to quantum teleportation, to the exchange of quantum states between light and matter, and to quantum repeaters. Recently he also studied opto-nanomechanics using mechanical membranes in high quality optical resonators. The full announcement, is available on the DPG website (text is in German).11.21.12

You're breaking the laws of Physics! Graduate Student, Tim Blasius, throws down the gauntlet with Conan O'Brien. Watch the video segment where O'Brien challenges viewers to find a mistake in his show. Tim points out errors in the segment The World's Shortest Freefall. When not challenging media figures to support their science, Tim works with the Painter group.10.24.12

Alexei Kitaev is featured on The Loh Down on Science [listen to the Oct 19 episode]. Sandra Tsing Loh hosts the radio program described as a fun way to get your daily dose of science plus a dash of humor in less than two minutes. If those two minutes leave you wanting more insight into Kitaev’s work, read John Preskill’s blog entry Alesha on the IQIM blog Quantum Frontiers. [Read more about the announcement of the Fundamental Physics Prize].10.19.12

Graduate student, Debaleena Nandi, is lead author on a Nature paper Exciton condensation and perfect Coulomb drag. The paper is further discussed by Steve Girvin where he claims Nandi and colleages have provided an example of quantum physics that allows the production of something previously considered impossible — namely, an electrical transformer (a device that boosts or reduces voltage) that works with unidirectional (d.c.) current instead of requiring periodically reversing (a.c.) current. [Read the full Nature article] [Read Girvin's comments in Nature - News and Views]10.2.12

David Hsieh joined Caltech and IQIM as an Assistant Professor of Physics this fall. One focus of his research will be to further work he started in graduate school on toplogical insulators. I'm very interested in fundamental physics. So the opportunity to build instruments that can enable discoveries—that's a very exciting thing for me. I like discovering things. I'm also interested in pushing the limits of instrumentation. If you look at the history of scientific discovery, unpredictable phenomena that ended up being important have almost always occurred concurrently with advancements in instrumentation. The difficulty in looking at these topological phases is that you need to push instruments to their very extremes.[Read the full article in Caltech News] 9.24.12

IQIM co-sponsored the Workshop on Majorana Fermions, Non-Abelian Statistics and Topological Quantum Information Processing held August 20-24 at ICTP. Gil Refael was one of the meeting organizers, but many members of IQIM attended and gave talks: Liang Jiang, Netanel Lindner, David Pekker, Jim Eisenstein, David Hsieh, Matthew Fisher. See the complete program for talk titles; streaming video of conference talks is also available here. 8.24.12

Researchers from the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech and Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, Laboratoire d'électronique des technologies de l'information (CEA-LETI) in Grenoble, France have made the first-ever mechanical device that can measure the mass of individual molecules one at a time. The device—which is only a couple millionths of a meter in size—consists of a tiny, vibrating bridge-like structure. When a particle or molecule lands on the bridge, its mass changes the oscillating frequency in a way that reveals how much the particle weighs. "As each particle comes in, we can measure its mass," says Michael Roukes, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering at Caltech. "Nobody's ever done this before." The team found that by looking at how the first two modes change frequencies when a particle lands, they could determine the particle's mass and position, explains Mehmet Selim Hanay, a postdoctoral researcher in Roukes's lab and first author of the paper. "With each measurement we can determine the mass of the particle, which wasn't possible in mechanical structures before." Descriptions of the experiment and details about the nano-devices are available in the article, Single-protein nanomechanical mass spectrometry in real time, published August 26 in the online journal Nature Nanotechnology. [CIT Press Release] [Read the article]8.26.12

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 nonlocally 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, 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." [Read the Guardian article] [Read the NY Times article][CIT Press release] 7.31.12

Keith Schwab, together with Markus Aspelmeyer at the University of Vienna and Pierre Meystre at the University of Arizona, describe in the July edition of Physics Today, how, aided by optical cavities and superconducting circuits, researchers are coaxing ever-larger objects to wiggle, shake, and flex in ways that are distinctly quantum mechanical. Today researchers at the cutting edge of physics are still exploiting simple mechanical elements as tools with which to carefully probe our world. But unlike their predecessors, they are preparing those elements deeply in the quantum regime and, in the process. challenging ancient notions of reality. Ironically, today’s devices, though similar in many ways to those of antiquity, steer us to a completely different worldview—one in which an object, possibly even a macroscopic one, can indeed act in two ways at the same time. [Read the article] 7.12.12

Two IQIM undergraduate students were honored at Caltech's Commencement on June 15. Soonwon Choi received the Richard P. Feynman Prize in Theoretical Physics, awarded to a senior on the basis of excellence in theoretical physics. Soonwon conducted research on the purification of single photon sources under the supervision of postdoctoral scholar Netanel Lindner. Soonwon will enter the Ph.D. program at Harvard in the fall. Kevin Kuns received the D. S. Kothari Prize in Physics, awarded to a graduating senior in physics who has produced an outstanding research project during the year. Kevin, with postdoctoral scholar Alexey Gorshkov, studied d-Wave superfluidity in optical lattices of ultracold polar molecules. Kevin will begin Ph.D studies at UC Santa Barbara next fall. Congratulations, Soonwon and Kevin!6.15.12

Working with study co-leads Baris Erkman from JPL, and Jeffrey H. Shapiro from MIT, Caltech's Keith Schwab, Professor of Applied Physics, are coordinating the KISS (Keck Institute for Space Science) workshop on Quantum Communication, Sensing and Measurement in Space scheduled for June 25-29. Yanbei Chen, Associate Professor of Physics, is presenting during the short course on Monday, June 25 andRana Adhikari, Assistant Professor of Physics, is acting as moderator during the June 26 session Quantum Theme: Measurement in space. [More about the KISS workshop and registration details]6.11.12

Building on work started while at Caltech, former postoc Stephen Jordan (now at NIST), former Postdoc Keith Lee (now a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh) and Caltech's John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, have demonstrated that a quantum computer of the future will be able to successfully simulate quantum field theory (which applies quantum mechanics to functions of space and time). In the Science article, they discuss an algorithm which would simulate all the possible interactions between two elementary particles colliding with each other. “We have this theoretical model of the quantum computer, and one of the big questions is, what physical processes that occur in nature can that model represent efficiently?" said Stephen Jordan, a theorist in NIST's Applied and Computational Mathematics Division. "Maybe particle collisions, maybe the early universe after the Big Bang? Can we use a quantum computer to simulate them and tell us what to expect?" [Read Paper] [NIST Press Release] 6.7.12

John Preskill selected as Aisenstadt Chair at the Centre de recherches mathématiques, University of Montreal. As the Aisenstadt chair in Fall 2011, Preskill delivered a series of four lectures: a public lecture, physics colloquia at McGill and Sherbrooke University, as well as a research talk in the Codes, Geometry and Random Structures workshop. The public lecture, “Putting weirdness to work: quantum information science,” gave a high-level introduction to quantum algorithms, key distribution and fault-tolerance, ending with a report on the current experimental state of the art. Read about the series of lectures in the CRM bulletin – Spring 2012, article begins on page 9. 5.30.12

Matthew Fisher elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. [Press Release] 5.7.12

The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech invites applications for postdoctoral scholar positions. IQIM investigators, spanning Caltech's departments of physics, applied physics, and computer science, conduct theoretical and experimental research in quantum information science, quantum many-body physics, quantum optics, and the quantum mechanics of mechanical systems. [Apply online] 3.1.12

Caltech has been awarded $12.6 million in funding by the National Science Foundation to create the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), the center will bring physicists and computer scientists together to push theoretical and experimental boundaries in the study of exotic quantum states. The co-directors of this institute are Professors Jeff Kimble, Jim Eisenstein, Oskar Painter, and John Preskill. "When you bring innovative scientists and engineers together and provide them with the facilities and collaborative spaces they need, magic happens. The magic involves transforming the way we think about and impact our world," says EAS Chair Ares Rosakis. [Caltech Press Release] 10.14.11

Physicists discover new way to visualize warped space and time. When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on—until now. [Caltech Press Release] 4.10.11

Oskar J. Painter, Professor of Applied Physics and Executive Officer for Applied Physics and Materials Science, and colleagues including graduate student Jasper Chan have cooled a miniature mechanical object—a tiny mechanical silicon beam— to its lowest possible energy state using laser light. The achievement paves the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive detectors. "In many ways, the experiment we've done provides a starting point for the really interesting quantum-mechanical experiments one wants to do," Painter says. [Caltech Press Release] 10.07.11

Jeff Kimble, William L. Valentine Professor and Professor of Physics has demonstrated quantum entanglement for a quantum state stored in four spatially distinct atomic memories. [Caltech Press Release] 11.17.10

Oskar Painter, Associate Professor of Applied Physics, along with colleagues Darrick Change, Postdoctoral Scholar at Institute for Quantum Information, and H. Jeff Kimble, William L. Valentine Professor and Professor of Physics have proposed a new paradigm that should allow scientists to observe quantum behavior in small mechanical systems. Their idea offers a new means of studying the nature of quantum superposition and entanglement in progressively larger and more complex systems. [Caltech Press Release] 11.21.09

Michael L. Roukes, Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering; Co-Director, Kavli Nanoscience Institute, and colleague Akshay Naik have created the first nanoscale mass spectrometer. This new technique simplifies and miniaturizes the measurement of the mass of molecules through the use of very tiny nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) resonators. Askshay Naik explains, "the frequency at which the resonator vibrates is directly proportional to its mass. When a protein lands on the resonator, it causes a decrease in the frequency at which the resonator vibrates and the frequency shift is proportional to the mass of the protein". Professor Roukes points out, "the next generation of instrumentation for the life sciences must enable proteomic analysis with very high throughput. The potential power of our approach is that it is based on semiconductor microelectronics fabrication, which has allowed creation of perhaps mankind's most complex technology." [Caltech Press Release] 7.22.09

Oskar Painter, Associate Professor of Applied Physics, and Kerry J. Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics; Director, The Lee Center for Advanced Networking have created a nanoscale crystal device that, for the first time, allows scientists to confine both light and sound vibrations in the same tiny space. "This novel approach... exemplifies the forward-thinking work being done by the Engineering and Applied Science division," says Ares Rosakis, Chair and Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech. [Caltech Press Release] 10.26.09

Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics; Director, The Lee Center for Advanced Networking along with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have created the first-ever phonon laser--a device that amplifies phonons in much the way that optical lasers amplify photons of light. 9.1.09

Matt LaHaye, Keith Schwab, Michael Roukes, and colleagues have developed a new tool to search for quantum effects in ordinary objects. Matt LaHaye is a postdoctoral research scientist working with Michael L. Roukes, a Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering and Codirector of Kavli Nanoscience Institute. "Quantum jumps are, perhaps, the archetypal signature of behavior governed by quantum effects," says Roukes. "To see these requires us to engineer a special kind of interaction between our measurement apparatus and the object being measured. Matt's results establish a practical and really intriguing way to make this happen." [Caltech Press Release] 7.2.09

Kerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics; Director, The Lee Center for Advanced Networking along with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have created the first-ever phonon laser--a device that amplifies phonons in much the way that optical lasers amplify photons of light. 9.29.08

Alexei Kitaev, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computer Science, has been named a MacArthur Fellow, winning one of the five-year, $500,000 grants that are awarded annually to creative, original individuals and that are often referred to as the "genius" awards. Kitaev explores the mysterious behavior of quantum systems and their implications for developing practical applications, such as quantum computers. He has made important theoretical contributions to a wide array of topics within condensed-matter physics, including quasicrystals and quantum chaos. [Caltech Press Release] 9.23.08