As MCQST Distinguished Lecturer, Markus Aspelmeyer, Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), is giving a series of talks targeted to varied audiences. This specialized seminar is designed for researchers working in the same field.

Levitated solids in the quantum regime as quantum sources of gravity: The decoherence challenge

The quantum optical control of solid-state mechanical devices, quantum optomechanics, has emerged as a new frontier of light-matter interactions. Objects currently under investigation cover a mass range of more than 17 orders of magnitude - from nanomechanical waveguides to macroscopic, kilogram-weight mirrors of gravitational wave detectors. Applying this approach to levitated solids opens up new ways of coherently controlling the motion of massive quantum objects in engineerable potential landscapes. Our team in Vienna is exploring and further developing this toolbox with the goal to realize quantum sources of gravity in the lab: superpositions of gravitationally distinct states of a massive object. One main challenge is to achieve sufficiently long coherence times in the presence of residual background gas, blackbody radiation, vibrations, imperfect control operations, etc., while making the object more massive and more delocalized. I will review basic considerations, experimental techniques and open questions in our efforts to minimize effects of decoherence in these experiments.

Talk is open to MCQST groups. Register below:

About Markus Aspelmeyer

Markus Aspelmeyer is Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He studied physics and philosophy in Munich, Germany. After a PhD in solid state physics from LMU Munich he switched fields to quantum optics. By combining these two backgrounds he became one of the early pioneers of the field of quantum optomechanics. Aspelmeyer is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg. His current research is focused on the intriguing puzzles around quantum physics and gravity.