Lecture

Controlling Quantum Matter with Light

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture by the instructor covers the topic of controlling quantum matter with light, focusing on photon-matter coupling strength, single atoms, superconducting circuits, semiconductor nano-structures, and inter-particle interactions. The presentation also delves into advances in physics related to strongly-correlated materials and theoretical frameworks by various researchers. Experimental setups integrating with electromagnets and exploring strong light-matter coupling are discussed, along with fermion pair polaritons and probing pair wave functions. The lecture concludes with insights on universal scaling and contact theory in the context of quantum matter manipulation.

Official source

Related concepts (18)

Superconducting magnet

A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct much larger electric currents than ordinary wire, creating intense magnetic fields. Superconducting magnets can produce stronger magnetic fields than all but the strongest non-superconducting electromagnets, and large superconducting magnets can be cheaper to operate because no energy is dissipated as heat in the windings.

Strongly correlated material

Strongly correlated materials are a wide class of compounds that include insulators and electronic materials, and show unusual (often technologically useful) electronic and magnetic properties, such as metal-insulator transitions, heavy fermion behavior, half-metallicity, and spin-charge separation. The essential feature that defines these materials is that the behavior of their electrons or spinons cannot be described effectively in terms of non-interacting entities.

Superconductivity

Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero.

Quasiparticle

In physics, quasiparticles and collective excitations are closely related phenomena arising when a microscopically complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it contained different weakly interacting particles in vacuum. For example, as an electron travels through a semiconductor, its motion is disturbed in a complex way by its interactions with other electrons and with atomic nuclei. The electron behaves as though it has a different effective mass travelling unperturbed in vacuum.

Exciton

An exciton is a bound state of an electron and an electron hole which are attracted to each other by the electrostatic Coulomb force. It is an electrically neutral quasiparticle that exists in insulators, semiconductors and some liquids. The exciton is regarded as an elementary excitation of condensed matter that can transport energy without transporting net electric charge. An exciton can form when a material absorbs a photon of higher energy than its bandgap. This excites an electron from the valence band into the conduction band.

Related lectures (18)

4, STM2_2024

Lindblad Equation

Explores the Lindblad equation and the Markov approximation in quantum optics.

Hydrogen Atom: Wave Function and Angular Momentum

Explores the wave function, angular momentum, electron spin, and open questions in atomic physics.

Quantum Optics I: Superconducting Circuits

Covers the fundamentals of superconducting circuits and their applications in quantum optics, including Josephson junctions and Cooper pair boxes.

Atoms and Radiation: Lineshapes