Quantum Optics Colloquium By Olivier Pfister

Engineering noninteracting-boson fields: from squeezed measurement noise to large-scale entanglement for quantum computing

Quantum optics may be viewed as the optics of manifestly nonclassical waves, such as matter waves, and it may also be understood as the nonclassical optics of any wave. The latter definition is more universal as it involves the quantum effect of particle statistics on wave phenomena such as interference, with a central role played by vacuum field modes. In this seminar, I will present several quantum optics experiments in which photon statistics are altered, or squeezed, away from the vacuum noise, for 1 to 60 modes of the same optical parametric oscillator. This multimode squeezing can be directly applied to secure communication, high-precision interferometry, and to generate continuous-variable cluster states for a possible record size (if not yet record fidelity) quantum computer.