Cindy Regal
Research associate Tom Purdy and his colleagues in the Regal group have just built an even better miniature light-powered machine that can now strip away noise from a laser beam. Their secret: a creative workaround of a quantum limit imposed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This limit makes it impossible to simultaneously reduce the noise on both the amplitude and phase of light inside interferometers and other high-tech instruments that detect miniscule position changes.
Researchers in the Regal group have gotten so good at using laser light to track the exact position of a tiny drum that they have been able to observe a limit imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. In a recent experiment, research associate Tom Purdy, graduate student Robert Peterson, and Fellow Cindy Regal were able to measure the motion of the drum by sending light back and forth through it many times. During the measurement, however, 100 million photons from the laser beam struck the drum at random and made it vibrate. This extra vibration obscured the motion of the drum at exactly the level of precision predicted by the laws of quantum mechanics.
The Regal group recently completed a nifty feat that had never been done before: The researchers grabbed onto a single trapped rubidium atom (87Rb) and placed it in its quantum ground state. This experiment has identified an important source of cold atoms that can be arbitrarily manipulated for investigations of quantum simulations and quantum logic gates in future high-speed computers.