Physics Department Colloquia |
Events During the Week of February 2nd through February 9th, 2014
Monday, February 3rd, 2014
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Thursday, February 6th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Friday, February 7th, 2014
- Quantum Optics with Microwave Photons
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 4:30 pm)
- Speaker: Maxim Vavilov, University of Wisconsin Department of Physics
- Abstract: Recent experiments revealed the quantum nature of electromagnetic fields of superconducting circuits at microwave frequencies.
Individual quanta of these fields are photons with energy a few million times smaller than the energy of an optical photon and are extremely hard to detect. A promising device for microwave photon detection is based on Josephson junctions. Even a single microwave photon with tiny energy is sufficient to switch a junction from the superconducting to voltage state, and detection of a photon reduces to observation of voltage pulses across the junction.
In this talk, I will present a theoretical model of a Josephson junction interacting with a quantized electromagnetic field and show that such Josephson photon detectors have relatively high efficiency of detection of microwave photons. I will discuss application of such detectors to qubit readout for quantum information processing and to studies of photon emission statistics by quantum electronic devices.