Event Details

Optics News

Ultra-Narrow Linewidth Brillouin Laser With Nanokelvin Temperature Self-Referencin

Speaker: Joe Becker

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a novel approach to stabilize thermal fluctuations in an effort to narrow the spectral linewidth of a Brillouin laser. Locking a laser to an optical resonator is the main approach to reach ultra-narrow laser linewidths. However temperature changes within the cavity result in frequency noise. This can be avoided by using a ULE optical cavity in a vacuum. However this comes at the cost of size and complexity. In an effort to create a ultra-stable laser with the potential to be used outside of a laboratory setting these researches developed a technique with "two orthogonal polarizations of the narrow Brillouin line as a metrological tool that precisely senses a minute change in the resonator's temperature at the level of 85 nK.

Main Talk

Quantum Jumps Beyond Thought Experiments

Speaker: Ricardo Gutierrez Jauregui

Quantum jumps of single trapped ions were observed in the seminal experiments of Wineland, Dehmelt, and Blatt in the mid 1980's. The idea behind these experiments was seeded in Dehmelt's electron shelving configuration, where the fluorescence of a driven two-state system is abruptly interrupted as the system transitions to a third, metastable, state. Recent developments using superconducting circuits suggest that these abrupt transitions might be caught mid-flight, thus showing that the discontinuous jump is actually a coherent evolution. In this talk, we review Dehmelt's proposal from a quantum trajectory perspective supporting this result. We also present a second configuration using a three level cascaded system where an upper bound on the duration of transmitted time for spontaneous emitted photons is given.