A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves (microwaves), through amplification by stimulated emission. The term is an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. First suggested by Joseph Weber, the first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely low-noise microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep-space spacecraft communication ground stations.
A SQUID is a very sensitive magnetometer used to measure extremely weak magnetic fields, based on superconducting loops containing Josephson junctions.
A klystron is a specialized linear-beam vacuum tube, invented in 1937 by American electrical engineers Russell and Sigurd Varian, which is used as an amplifier for high radio frequencies, from UHF up into the microwave range. Low-power klystrons are used as oscillators in terrestrial microwave relay communications links, while high-power klystrons are used as output tubes in UHF television transmitters, satellite communication, radar transmitters, and to generate the drive power for modern particle accelerators.
An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle originally postulated by the Peccei–Quinn theory in 1977 to resolve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.
Robert Henry Dicke was an American astronomer and physicist who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity. He was the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University (1975–1984).
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is an experiment in astroparticle physics to search for axions originating from the Sun. The experiment, sited at CERN in Switzerland, was commissioned in 1999 and came online in 2002 with the first data-taking run starting in May 2003. The successful detection of solar axions would constitute a major discovery in particle physics, and would also open up a brand new window on the astrophysics of the solar core.
A gyrotron is a class of high-power linear-beam vacuum tubes that generates millimeter-wave electromagnetic waves by the cyclotron resonance of electrons in a strong magnetic field. Output frequencies range from about 20 to 527 GHz, covering wavelengths from microwave to the edge of the terahertz gap. Typical output powers range from tens of kilowatts to 1–2 megawatts. Gyrotrons can be designed for pulsed or continuous operation. The gyrotron was invented by Soviet scientists at NIRFI, based in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid state quantum computing that implements superconducting electronic circuits using superconducting qubits as artificial atoms, or quantum dots. For superconducting qubits, the two logic states are the ground state and the excited state, denoted respectively. Research in superconducting quantum computing is conducted by companies such as Google, IBM, IMEC, BBN Technologies, Rigetti, and Intel. Many recently developed QPUs use superconducting architecture.
Microwave spectroscopy is the spectroscopy method that employs microwaves, i.e. electromagnetic radiation at GHz frequencies, for the study of matter.
An optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is a parametric oscillator that oscillates at optical frequencies. It converts an input laser wave with frequency into two output waves of lower frequency by means of second-order nonlinear optical interaction. The sum of the output waves' frequencies is equal to the input wave frequency: . For historical reasons, the two output waves are called "signal" and "idler", where the output wave with higher frequency is the "signal". A special case is the degenerate OPO, when the output frequency is one-half the pump frequency, , which can result in half-harmonic generation when signal and idler have the same polarization.
The chameleon is a hypothetical scalar particle that couples to matter more weakly than gravity, postulated as a dark energy candidate. Due to a non-linear self-interaction, it has a variable effective mass which is an increasing function of the ambient energy density—as a result, the range of the force mediated by the particle is predicted to be very small in regions of high density but much larger in low-density intergalactic regions: out in the cosmos chameleon models permit a range of up to several thousand parsecs. As a result of this variable mass, the hypothetical fifth force mediated by the chameleon is able to evade current constraints on equivalence principle violation derived from terrestrial experiments even if it couples to matter with a strength equal or greater than that of gravity. Although this property would allow the chameleon to drive the currently observed acceleration of the universe's expansion, it also makes it very difficult to test for experimentally.
Anthony E. Siegman was an electrical engineer and educator at Stanford University who investigated and taught about masers and lasers. Known to almost all as Tony Siegman, he was president of the Optical Society of America [now Optica (society)] in 1999 and was awarded the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal in 2009.
A transition-edge sensor (TES) is a type of cryogenic energy sensor or cryogenic particle detector that exploits the strongly temperature-dependent resistance of the superconducting phase transition.
An optical transistor, also known as an optical switch or a light valve, is a device that switches or amplifies optical signals. Light occurring on an optical transistor's input changes the intensity of light emitted from the transistor's output while output power is supplied by an additional optical source. Since the input signal intensity may be weaker than that of the source, an optical transistor amplifies the optical signal. The device is the optical analog of the electronic transistor that forms the basis of modern electronic devices. Optical transistors provide a means to control light using only light and has applications in optical computing and fiber-optic communication networks. Such technology has the potential to exceed the speed of electronics, while conserving more power. The fastest demonstrated all-optical switching signal is 900 attoseconds, which paves the way to develop ultrafast optical transistors.
SIMPLE is an experiment search for direct evidence of dark matter. It is located in a 61 m3 cavern at the 500 level of the Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit near Apt in southern France. The experiment is predominantly sensitive to spin-dependent interactions of weakly interacting massive particles.
In quantum computing, and more specifically in superconducting quantum computing, a transmon is a type of superconducting charge qubit designed to have reduced sensitivity to charge noise. The transmon was developed by Robert J. Schoelkopf, Michel Devoret, Steven M. Girvin, and their colleagues at Yale University in 2007. Its name is an abbreviation of the term transmission line shunted plasma oscillation qubit; one which consists of a Cooper-pair box "where the two superconductors are also [capacitively] shunted in order to decrease the sensitivity to charge noise, while maintaining a sufficient anharmonicity for selective qubit control".
The dark photon is a hypothetical hidden sector particle, proposed as a force carrier similar to the photon of electromagnetism but potentially connected to dark matter. In a minimal scenario, this new force can be introduced by extending the gauge group of the Standard Model of Particle Physics with a new abelian U(1) gauge symmetry. The corresponding new spin-1 gauge boson can then couple very weakly to electrically charged particles through kinetic mixing with the ordinary photon and could thus be detected. The dark photon can also interact with the Standard Model if some of the fermions are charged under the new abelian group. The possible charging arrangements are restricted by a number of consistency requirements such as anomaly cancellation and constraints coming from Yukawa matrices.
BASE, AD-8, is a multinational collaboration at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN, Geneva. The goal of the Japanese and German BASE collaboration are high-precision investigations of the fundamental properties of the antiproton, namely the charge-to-mass ratio and the magnetic moment.
Yannis K. Semertzidis is a physicist exploring axions as a dark matter candidate, precision physics in storage rings including muon g-2 and proton electric dipole moment (pEDM). The axion and the pEDM are intimately connected through the strong CP problem. Furthermore, if the pEDM is found to be non-zero, it can help resolve the matter anti-matter asymmetry mystery of our universe. During his research career, he held a number of positions in the Department of Physics in Brookhaven National Laboratory, including initiator and co-spokesperson of the Storage Ring Electric Dipole Moment Collaboration. He is the founding director of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research, is a professor in the Physics Department of KAIST, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Direct detection of dark matter is the science of attempting to directly measure dark matter collisions in Earth-based experiments. Modern astrophysical measurements, such as from the Cosmic Microwave Background, strongly indicate that 85% of the matter content of the universe is unaccounted for. Although the existence of dark matter is widely believed, what form it takes or its precise properties has never been determined. There are three main avenues of research to detect dark matter: attempts to make dark matter in accelerators, indirect detection of dark matter annihilation, and direct detection of dark matter in terrestrial labs. The founding principle of direct dark matter detection is that since dark matter is known to exist in the local universe, as the Earth, Solar System, and the Milky Way Galaxy carve out a path through the universe they must intercept dark matter, regardless of what form it takes.
