Physics Frontier Center News

Jay Deep Sau, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland and fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for 2016. This award, granted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, identifies 126 early-career scientists based on their potential to contribute fundamentally significant research to a wider academic community.

Harnessing quantum systems for information processing will require controlling large numbers of basic building blocks called qubits. The qubits must be isolated, and in most cases cooled such that, among other things, errors in qubit operations do not overwhelm the system, rendering it useless. Led by JQI Fellow Christopher Monroe, physicists have recently demonstrated important steps towards implementing a proposed type of gate, which does not rely on super-cooling their ion qubits.

Particles can be classified as bosons or fermions. A defining characteristic of a boson is its ability to pile into a single quantum state with other bosons. Fermions are not allowed to do this. One broad impact of fermionic anti-social behavior is that it allows for carbon-based life forms, like us, to exist. If the universe were solely made from bosons, life would certainly not look like it does. Recently, JQI theorists* have proposed an elegant method for achieving transmutation--that is, making bosons act like fermions.

Sylvain Ravets has recently been awarded the DIM Nano-K prize for his thesis “Development of tools for quantum engineering using individual atoms: optical nanofibers and controlled Rydberg interactions.” Awarded annually by C’Nano IdF (a French organization promoting nanoscience research), the prize recognizes him for “research at the interface between nanosciences and cold atoms.” The DIM Nano-K gathers IFRAF (Île-de-France Cold Atom Research Institute) and C’Nano IdF (centre of