This course provides the foundations for contemporary research in selected areas of atomic and optical physics, including the quantum-mechanical behavior of atoms and photons, and how these properties may relate to quantum information processing.
This course provides the foundations for contemporary research in selected areas of atomic and optical physics, including the quantum-mechanical behavior of atoms and photons, and how these properties may relate to quantum information processing.
This is the first of a two-semester subject sequence that provides the foundations for contemporary research in selected areas of atomic and optical physics, including the quantum-mechanical behavior of atoms and photons, and how these properties may relate to quantum information processing.
Undergraduate physics, including quantum mechanics, calculus, and linear algebra
Wolfgang Ketterle has been the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT since 1998. He received a diploma (equivalent to master’s degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich (1986). He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and at the University of Heidelberg in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics. In 1990, he came to MIT as a postdoc and joined the physics faculty in 1993. Since 2006, he is the director of the Center of Ultracold Atoms, an NSF funded research center, and Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. His research group studies properties of ultracold atomic matter.
For additional biographical information on Professor Ketterle, see his autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation.
Prof. Chuang is a pioneer in the field of quantum information science. His experimental realization of two, three, five, and seven quantum bit quantum computers using nuclear spins in molecules provided the first laboratory demonstrations of many important quantum algorithms, including Shor’s quantum factoring algorithm. The error correction, algorithmic cooling, and entanglement manipulation techniques he developed provide new ways to obtain complete quantum control over light and matter, and lay a foundation for possible large-scale quantum information processing systems.
Prof. Chuang came to MIT in 2000 from IBM, where he was a research staff member. He received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. Prof. Chuang also holds two bachelors and one masters degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author, together with Michael Nielsen, of the textbook Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.
Professor Pritchard carried out pioneering experiments on the interaction of atoms with light that led to the creation of the field of atom optics. His demonstration of the diffraction of a beam of atoms by a grating made of light waves opened the way to studies of the diffraction, reflection, and focusing of matter waves, similar to those with light waves. He has applied atom optics to basic studies of quantum theory, to new methods for studying the properties of atoms, and to the creation of devices such as the atom interferometer and atom wave gyroscope.
Professor Pritchard received his B.S. from California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from Harvard, working with Professor Daniel Kleppner, who soon thereafter came to MIT, bringing Pritchard with him as a postdoctoral fellow. Pritchard joined the faculty of the Department of Physics in 1970. He has many honors, including the Broida Prize of the American Physical Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.