Quantum physics
Here are scientists related to this topic. Choose one to read about their work and ask them your questions.
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Leah Morgan
Current Job: Graduate Diagnostic Mechanical Engineer
My latest work:
I’m a physics graduate working as an engineer in fusion energy!
My main projects include designing and installing radiation shielding for some of the equipment close to our fusion reactor. We have a lot of high-energy experiments coming up and we know the radiation is going to destroy all the electronics, fibre optic cables, and rubber seals!
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Jose Brandao-Neto
My latest work:
How proteins want to do chemistry.
And lining up my new book, whose title will be Adventures in Artificial Intelligence and Structural Biology – Tips, Tricks and Music from Proteins, coming out to Amazon Kindle soon as a D.J. Protein and D.J. DNA Excellent Science Books Series (I’ll post a link here when ready).
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Adam Washington
Current Job: I am an Instrument Scientist at the ISIS Pulsed Neutorn and Muon source. I help visiting scientists perform experiment on the Larmor beamline. Larmor is a neutron instrument for measuring a wide range of small lengths in samples. Depending on our setup, we can go from 25 microns (about the thickness of a single wool fibre) down to 0.001 Angstroms (100 times smaller than an atom).
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Ieva Cepaite
Current Job: PhD Candidate
My latest work:
I’m currently trying to come up with Quantum Algorithms to improve solutions to so-called Partial Differential Equations which are very useful in many fields of Physics and Engineering (fluid-dynamics, electrodynamics, elasticity etc.).
Basically I’m trying to come up with new, better methods for old (but important) problems using the incredibly complicated way that Quantum Computers process information. It involves things like superposition and entanglement in order to improve speed or accuracy of solutions.
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Araceli Venegas-Gomez
Current Job: I have always been interested in science since I was a child, and kept myself up to date with the latest scientific news. Some years ago I started to participate more actively in science discussions and conferences as a hobby. I’m actually an aerospace engineer and science lover. After several years working in industry, I decided to follow my passion for science, and became a Physics PhD student! I like to think that I might discover new things about the universe at the quantum level. I love explaining complicated concepts and raising science awareness to the general public. I fell in love with Quantum Mechanics. I wanted to learn more about it and found it so exciting that when I took the decision to quit my job in industry and go into research, I knew it had to be in that field. There are just so many unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries about the universe we live in, both at a macro level and, in my case, at the tiniest level. I know, I’m a total science freak!
My latest work:
Many phenomena in the quantum world cannot be investigated directly in the laboratory, and even supercomputers fail at simulating them. Quantum simulators are specific purpose devices designed to provide insight on unique physics problems. I work with quantum simulators, using mathematical models to mimic the interactions of atoms in optical (light-made) lattices. With these investigations we can design specific magnetic properties or control matter to eventually create a quantum computer.
Behind all great technological advances in History there was a huge amount of theoretical work required to understand how things really work. To use a couple of examples, the GPS is based on the Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and the laser invention relied on understanding the discrete nature of atomic energy levels (the quanta), which is the basis of Quantum Mechanics. Today, lasers are surrounding us and are key part of many commons tools we use daily! Quantum Physics studies the universe at the smallest level, and its applications are part of our daily life, in computers, magnetic resonance, lasers … Specifically in my work, we study quantum magnetism, directly linked to high temperature superconductors, leading to possible new materials in the future.
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Harikesh Ranganath
Current Job: After an MSc in Advanced Physics, I am pursuing a PhD in Experimetnal Quantum Optics
My latest work:
I work on a Quantum Gas Microscope. This is essentially a camera with resolution enough to see individual atoms (with a few tricks). We use high intensity lasers to trap Potassium atoms in a vacuum. We then shake them with Raman lasers to make them emit light and we take a picture! Below is what a typical picture looks like (each bright spot is a single atom of Potassium!).
We are very interested in understanding Superconductivity – the phenomenon when a material has zero resistance to electricity. If you put any current into a superconducting loop it will keep flowing forever.
There are a lot of amazing applications for this such as in quantum computing, high power electromagnets, magnetic levitation trains, and so on. Our mobile phones are computers much smaller and much more powerful than the biggest computers even 50 years ago. This became possible because of semi-conductor devices. Similarly, superconductor based devices could dramatically change what’s possible.
Scientists have discovered certain materials which are superconductors, but they only show these properties at extremely low temperatures (-100 celsius). The internal structure of these materials are also not well understood. We use this setup and our high resolution imaging as a “material we can customize”. We can change the properties of this “material” (which in our experiment is a sheet of atoms held in place by lasers) just by configuring our lasers and magnetic fields, hence we can explore how different materials behave in different conditions without having to make and test new materials (which is both difficult and expensive).
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David Keeble
Current Job: Professor, Head of Physics
My latest work:
One of our current projects is as part of a collaboration led by colleagues at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. It is an international collaboration performing positron lifetime measurements on the same series of well characterized materials that have nano-meter size open-volume (pores or voids) in a number of laboratories across the world. In the materials we are measuring some, in fact the majority, of the positrons we implant move into the nano-meter size open spaces, picking up an electron on the way, and forming what is called a positronium atoms. This is a electron bound to its anti-particle the positron. Those positronium atoms that form where the spins of the two particles are aligned would live for approximately 142 nanoseconds in a vacuum. This is a very long time to us as we typically measure lifetimes a thousand times smaller. However, these positronium atoms ‘bounce’ about inside the pore in the material and so annihilate typically after only a few nanoseconds. From the actual lifetime of the positronium we can calculate the approximate diameter of the pore. Materials scientists cannot easily measure pores/voids with nano-meter size. Our collaboration is aiming to produce standard samples and guidance on how to perform the measurements so that this method can be more widely used.