Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Advances in understanding and using light for quantum communication and metrology provide new opportunities for sensing applications in a wide variety of contexts. I will examine efforts to use the coupling of light to motion — radiation pressure — for tasks ranging from high accuracy acceleration sensors to femtonewton force balances. These efforts then naturally lead to the possibility of integrating electrical circuits with such optomechanical elements. When combined with the emerging understanding of circuit quantum electrodynamics, we can provide a framework for the quantum mechanical transduction of information from the microwave domain to the optical domain via opto-electromechanical devices. Finally, looking deeper into the quantum dynamics of these systems suggests a near future application in quantum simulation in which phonons and photons are the constituent particles of such a simulator.

Biography:  Taylor is a Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, co-director of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and a Joint Quantum Institute Fellow. His research group investigates the fundamental limits to quantum devices for computation and communication. He received an AB in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics at Harvard in 2000 and then spent a year as a Luce Scholar at the University of Tokyo. Taylor returned to Harvard for his PhD in the group of Mikhail Lukin in 2006, working on approaches to quantum computing and fault tolerance using spins in quantum dots. He went on to a Pappalardo Fellowship at MIT, working with members of both the Condensed Matter Theory group and the Center for Theoretical Physics,  and during that time co-invented diamond-based magnetometry. In 2009

Taylor joined the Joint Quantum Institute and NIST. He is the recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the AAAS, the Samuel J. Heyman Service to American "Call to Service" medal, the Silver Medal of the Commerce Department, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering, and the IUPAP C15 Young Scientist prize. More information can be found at http://groups.jqi.umd.edu/taylor