Long and Medium-Term Research: Quantum Nondemolition Measurements in Microwave Cavities

Long and Medium-Term Research: Quantum Nondemolition Measurements in Microwave Cavities This award is under the Long and Medium-Term Research at Foreign Centers of Excellence Program, which enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twelve months of research abroad at research centers of proven excellence. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. David Weiss of Stanford University to work with Professor Serge Haroche at L'Ecole Normale Superieure. This project is in the field of Quantum Optics, specifically in Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics. An apparatus is currently under construction at L'Ecole Normale Superieure which will enable the field in a high finesse microwave cavity to be measured using beams of atoms in a long-lived Rydberg states. The cavity is detuned from an atomic resonance so that while the atoms experience a measurable energy shift due to light in the cavity, they do not absorb any of the cavity's photons. This so-called quantum non-demolition scheme is the first that promises to allow measurements of extremely weak fields, down to the single photon level. The likely first experiments using this system will be the preparation of non-classical states of the field, including pure number states, where the exact number of photons is determined at the expense of all knowledge of the field's phase, and 'Schrodinger cat' states, which are coherent superpositions of different classical fields. The award recommendation provides funds to cover international travel and a stipend for twelve months.