 |
Gerhard Rempe (born 22 April 1956 in Bottrop/Westphalia) is a German physicist, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. He has performed pioneering experiments in atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and quantum information processing.
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(July 2023) |
Gerhard Rempe studied mathematics and physics at the Universities of Essen and Munich between 1976 and 1982. In 1986 he received his PhD degree at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The thesis was entitled "investigation of the interaction of Rydberg atoms with radiation" and reports on experiments performed in the group of Herbert Walther. In the same year he was awarded a first job offer to a permanent position as a lecturer at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Rempe remained in Munich and completed his habilitation in 1990 with the thesis "Quantum effects in the one-atom maser". From 1990 to 1991 he was Lecturer and from 1990 to 1992 Robert Andrews Millikan Fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, US, working with H. Jeff Kimble. In 1992 he accepted an appointment as professor of experimental physics at the University of Konstanz. In 1999 he was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society, director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich. He declined simultaneous offers to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Rempe is considered a pioneer of the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics. He was first to observe how a single atom repeatedly emits and absorbs a single photon. [1] First experiments he performed with microwave photons in superconducting cavities. Later he expanded his interest to optical photons between mirrors of highest possible reflectivity. [2] His experiments laid the foundation for the development of quantum nonlinear optics, in which a single particle, be it an atom or a photon, causes an effect that many particles cannot induce. [3]
Rempe has used his findings from basic research to develop novel interfaces between light and matter. [4] These interfaces connect the everyday world with the quantum world and have potential applications as senders, receivers and memories of information in a future global quantum network. [5] A remarkable feature of the interface is its ability to detect single photons nondestructively,< [6] which opens new perspectives for a scalable quantum computer. [7] The interface is also suitable to observe and control the motion of a single atom in real time, [8] [9] as well as to generate quantum light with noise below the shot noise level. [10]
Rempe has also done pioneering work in the field of atom optics and quantum gases. By means of an atom interferometer he was able to demonstrate experimentally that for an observed object passing through a double-slit arrangement quantum mechanical wave-particle duality is based on entanglement, instead of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation for position and momentum, as often stated in textbooks. [11] He has produced the first Bose-Einstein condensate outside the U.S. and has used it to generate, among others, a strongly correlated gas of molecules by means of the quantum Zeno effect. [12]
In a third research focus Rempe follows the goal to produce an ultracold gas of polyatomic molecules. The focus lies on the development of novel methods for slowing down complex molecules using a centrifuge [13] and for cooling such molecules using the Sisyphus effect. [14] The aim is to understand chemical reactions at low temperatures, to open new reaction channels, to prepare molecules for precision experiments, as well as producing neutral quantum many-body systems with a long-range electrical interaction.
In addition to his research and teaching activities, Rempe was and is engaged in academic self-administration, such as speaker of the Quantum Optics and Photonics section of the German Physical Society, the curator of several magazines such as "Physics in our Time", "Journal of Optics" and "Optics Communications ", as chairperson of a selection panel of the European Research Council, as managing director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and chairperson of the prize committee of the Stern-Gerlach medal of the German Physical Society.
A Rydberg atom is an excited atom with one or more electrons that have a very high principal quantum number, n. The higher the value of n, the farther the electron is from the nucleus, on average. Rydberg atoms have a number of peculiar properties including an exaggerated response to electric and magnetic fields, long decay periods and electron wavefunctions that approximate, under some conditions, classical orbits of electrons about the nuclei. The core electrons shield the outer electron from the electric field of the nucleus such that, from a distance, the electric potential looks identical to that experienced by the electron in a hydrogen atom.
An optical microcavity or microresonator is a structure formed by reflecting faces on the two sides of a spacer layer or optical medium, or by wrapping a waveguide in a circular fashion to form a ring. The former type is a standing wave cavity, and the latter is a traveling wave cavity. The name microcavity stems from the fact that it is often only a few micrometers thick, the spacer layer sometimes even in the nanometer range. As with common lasers, this forms an optical cavity or optical resonator, allowing a standing wave to form inside the spacer layer or a traveling wave that goes around in the ring.
Quantum networks form an important element of quantum computing and quantum communication systems. Quantum networks facilitate the transmission of information in the form of quantum bits, also called qubits, between physically separated quantum processors. A quantum processor is a small quantum computer being able to perform quantum logic gates on a certain number of qubits. Quantum networks work in a similar way to classical networks. The main difference is that quantum networking, like quantum computing, is better at solving certain problems, such as modeling quantum systems.
Coherent control is a quantum mechanics-based method for controlling dynamic processes by light. The basic principle is to control quantum interference phenomena, typically by shaping the phase of laser pulses. The basic ideas have proliferated, finding vast application in spectroscopy mass spectra, quantum information processing, laser cooling, ultracold physics and more.
Photoexcitation is the production of an excited state of a quantum system by photon absorption. The excited state originates from the interaction between a photon and the quantum system. Photons carry energy that is determined by the wavelengths of the light that carries the photons. Objects that emit light with longer wavelengths, emit photons carrying less energy. In contrast to that, light with shorter wavelengths emit photons with more energy. When the photon interacts with a quantum system, it is therefore important to know what wavelength one is dealing with. A shorter wavelength will transfer more energy to the quantum system than longer wavelengths.
A spin ice is a magnetic substance that does not have a single minimal-energy state. It has magnetic moments (i.e. "spin") as elementary degrees of freedom which are subject to frustrated interactions. By their nature, these interactions prevent the moments from exhibiting a periodic pattern in their orientation down to a temperature much below the energy scale set by the said interactions. Spin ices show low-temperature properties, residual entropy in particular, closely related to those of common crystalline water ice. The most prominent compounds with such properties are dysprosium titanate (Dy2Ti2O7) and holmium titanate (Ho2Ti2O7). The orientation of the magnetic moments in spin ice resembles the positional organization of hydrogen atoms (more accurately, ionized hydrogen, or protons) in conventional water ice (see figure 1).
In quantum optics, a NOON state or N00N state is a quantum-mechanical many-body entangled state:
Atomtronics is an emerging type of computing consisting of matter-wave circuits which coherently guide propagating ultra-cold atoms. The systems typically include components analogous to those found in electronic or optical systems, such as beam splitters and transistors. Applications range from studies of fundamental physics to the development of practical devices.
A spaser or plasmonic laser is a type of laser which aims to confine light at a subwavelength scale far below Rayleigh's diffraction limit of light, by storing some of the light energy in electron oscillations called surface plasmon polaritons. The phenomenon was first described by David J. Bergman and Mark Stockman in 2003. The word spaser is an acronym for "surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The first such devices were announced in 2009 by three groups: a 44-nanometer-diameter nanoparticle with a gold core surrounded by a dyed silica gain medium created by researchers from Purdue, Norfolk State and Cornell universities, a nanowire on a silver screen by a Berkeley group, and a semiconductor layer of 90 nm surrounded by silver pumped electrically by groups at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at Arizona State University. While the Purdue-Norfolk State-Cornell team demonstrated the confined plasmonic mode, the Berkeley team and the Eindhoven-Arizona State team demonstrated lasing in the so-called plasmonic gap mode. In 2018, a team from Northwestern University demonstrated a tunable nanolaser that can preserve its high mode quality by exploiting hybrid quadrupole plasmons as an optical feedback mechanism.
Klaus Blaum is a German physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.
Dirk (Dik) Bouwmeester is a Dutch experimental physicist specializing in quantum optics and quantum information. He currently holds faculty positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Single-photon sources are light sources that emit light as single particles or photons. These sources are distinct from coherent light sources (lasers) and thermal light sources such as incandescent light bulbs. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that a state with an exact number of photons of a single frequency cannot be created. However, Fock states can be studied for a system where the electric field amplitude is distributed over a narrow bandwidth. In this context, a single-photon source gives rise to an effectively one-photon number state. Photons from an ideal single-photon source exhibit quantum mechanical characteristics. These characteristics include photon antibunching, so that the time between two successive photons is never less than some minimum value. This behaviour is normally demonstrated by using a beam splitter to direct about half of the incident photons toward one avalanche photodiode, and half toward a second. Pulses from one detector are used to provide a ‘counter start’ signal, to a fast electronic timer, and the other, delayed by a known number of nanoseconds, is used to provide a ‘counter stop’ signal. By repeatedly measuring the times between ‘start’ and ‘stop’ signals, one can form a histogram of time delay between two photons and the coincidence count- if bunching is not occurring, and photons are indeed well spaced, a clear notch around zero delay is visible.
Whispering-gallery waves, or whispering-gallery modes, are a type of wave that can travel around a concave surface. Originally discovered for sound waves in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral, they can exist for light and for other waves, with important applications in nondestructive testing, lasing, cooling and sensing, as well as in astronomy.
Immanuel Bloch is a German experimental physicist. His research is focused on the investigation of quantum many-body systems using ultracold atomic and molecular quantum gases. Bloch is known for his work on atoms in artificial crystals of light, optical lattices, especially the first realization of a quantum phase transition from a weakly interacting superfluid to a strongly interacting Mott insulating state of matter.
Tilman Esslinger is a German experimental physicist. He is Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and works in the field of ultracold quantum gases and optical lattices.
Christopher Roy Monroe is an American physicist and engineer in the areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information science, especially quantum computing. He directs one of the leading research and development efforts in ion trap quantum computing. Monroe is the Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University and is College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Computer Science. He is also co-founder and Chief Scientist at IonQ, Inc.
Jürgen Mlynek is a German physicist and was president of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres from 2005 to 2015.
Bose–Einstein condensation of polaritons is a growing field in semiconductor optics research, which exhibits spontaneous coherence similar to a laser, but through a different mechanism. A continuous transition from polariton condensation to lasing can be made similar to that of the crossover from a Bose–Einstein condensate to a BCS state in the context of Fermi gases. Polariton condensation is sometimes called “lasing without inversion”.
Hidetoshi Katori, is a Japanese physicist and professor at the University of Tokyo best known for having invented the magic wavelength technique for ultra precise optical lattice atomic clocks. Since 2011, Katori is also Chief Scientist at the Quantum Metrology Lab, RIKEN.
Christine A. Muschik is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo as well as a part of the Institute for Quantum Computing.. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels. As of 2020, she has over 2000 citations on over 50 publications. She has also been featured in several articles in Nature magazine, MIT Technology Review, and Physics World.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
