About QUINST

Quantum mechanics is at the heart of our technology and economy - the laser and the transistor are quantum devices - but its full potential is far from being realized. Recent technological advances in optics, nanoscience and engineering allow experimentalists to create artificial structures or put microscopic and mesoscopic systems under new manipulable conditions in which quantum phenomena play a fundamental role.

Quantum technologies exploit these effects with practical purposes. The objective of Quantum Science is to discover, study, and control quantum efects at a fundamental level. These are two sides of a virtuous circle: new technologies lead to the discovery and study of new phenomena that will lead to new technologies.

Our aim is  to control and understand quantum phenomena in a multidisciplinary intersection of  Quantum Information, Quantum optics and cold atoms, Quantum Control, Spintronics, Quantum metrology, Atom interferometry, Superconducting qubits and Circuit QED and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.

QUINST is funded in part as a “Grupo Consolidado” from the Basque Government (IT472-10, IT986-16, IT1470-22)  and functions as a network of groups with their own funding, structure, and specific goals.  

Latest events

Seminar

Dr. Steven Habraken (Leiden University, Netherlands)

When and where

From: 11/2011 To: 11/2016

Description

 2010/04/15, Dr. Steven Habraken (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Place:  Sala de Seminarios del Departamento de Física Teórica e Historia de la Ciencia
Time: 10:30
Title: Rays and Waves in Singular Optics

Abstract
We study the spatial structure, physical properties and quantum dynamics of coherent optical modes with twisted and rotating boundary conditions. Our characterization of such modes is exact up to leading order of the paraxial approximation and involves two pairs of bosonic ladder operators in the spirit of the quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillator, which connect modes of different order. Although the ladder operators act in the  wave-optical domain, their transformation through an optical set-up can be expressed in terms of a ray matrix, which describes the transformation of a ray through the same set-up and has a purely geometric-optics significance. We discuss various geometric aspects such as the rotational stabilization and destabilization of an optical cavity and the geometric origin of generalized Gouy phase shifts.