Month: October 2018

On Wednesday 17th of October we had the pleasure to welcome Dr. Chris Wade from Oxford University to give a seminar to the AMOPP group about progress towards interferometry with exotic quantum states of light, more specifically Holland-Burnett states. This was a very interesting talk with a great mix of theory and experimental results. The abstract can be seen below.

Towards enhanced interferometry using quantum states of light

Quantum metrology is concerned with the enhanced measurement precision that may be gained by exploiting quantum mechanical correlations. In the scenario presented by optical inteferometry, several successful implementations have already been demonstrated including gravitational wave detectors [1], and lab-scale experiments [2,3]. However there are still open problems to be solved, including loss tolerance and scalability. In this seminar I will present progress implementing loss-tolerant Holland-Burnett states [4], and work searching for other practical states to implement [5].

[1] Schnabel et al. Nat. Comm. 1. 121 (2010)
[2] Slussarenko et al. Nat. Phot. 11, 700 (2017)
[3] Yonezawa et al. Science, 337, 1514 (2012)
[4] Holland and Burnett, PRL, 71, 1355 (1993)
[5] Knott et al, PRA, 93, 033859 (2016)

On Wednesday 10th October we had Dr. Luis  Masanes from within the UCL AMOPP group give a very interesting seminar. His talk was focused on the fundamental questions posed by the measurement postulates of quantum mechanics, and how they are redundant given the other postulates that form the basis of quantum mechanics. Dr. Masanes was kind enough to provide a copy of his slides here and the abstract can be seen below.

The Measurement Postulates of Quantum Mechanics are Redundant

Understanding the core content of quantum mechanics requires us to disentangle the hidden logical relationships between the postulates of this theory. The theorem presented in this work shows that the mathematical structure of quantum measurements, the formula for assigning outcome probabilities (Born’s rule) and the post-measurement state-update rule, can be deduced from the other quantum postulates, often referred to as “unitary quantum mechanics”. This result unveils a deep connection between the dynamical and probabilistic parts of quantum mechanics, and it brings us one step closer to understand what is this theory telling us about the inner workings of Nature.