Quantum Source on LinkedIn: #quantumcomputing #scientific #engineering #quantum | 18 comments
Summary
But if I try to pin-point one specific contribution, one example jumps into my mind, one that is often neglected, hidden behind the mass and impact of his later works, and one that alone was enough, in my view, to grant him a Nobel award. It is the first observation of antibunching in resonance fluorescence - namely showing that individual atoms emitted light in discrete units that cannot be divided (PRL 39, 691, 1977) . Bearing in mind that the quantization of light in 1900 by Max Planck was in fact the birth of the entire field of quantum mechanics, this demonstration is undoubtedly a historical cornerstone. Exactly 30 years later, as a postdoc at Jeffs Quantum Optics Group, I was fortunate to repeat that same experiment, only in a new platform (attaining a much cleaner result) - single atoms interacting with fiber-coupled photons, using chip-based microresonators (Science 319, 1062, 2008). When I showed Jeff my results, he went into his office for a couple of hours, and then came back, all excited, saying: "I now understand it - it is exactly like (Howard) Carmichael described it - the linear optical system cancels out, and whatever we see at the output is actually emitted directly by the atom.
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