Posted in November 2011
Josephine van Leeuwen
graduated today. She was the first master student of Leo Di Carlo in his function as prof in Delft, and of Diego Riste in his function as phd student. So all three received deserved congratulations today.
Josephine was instumental in desinging, checking and measuring 3d superconducting cavities that serve as unbelievably high-quality resonators to play qubit games with. I never saw Lorentian shapes that fit so tightly. The cavities hosted already some qubits of a record-long decay time and they promise to revolutionize the field.
Good luck to Josephine with her future. When her grandson boasts with his last acquision,a supercool quantum ipad, she may be able to recognize her desing and he may believe her.
A manifestly strong fluctuation
has occurred today: the paper with Matti Laakso and Tero Heikkillä, entitled correspondingly (see this post ), has been accepted for Physical Review Letters today, without any revisions, within a first round of the referee reports and in three weeks upon submission. I cannot recall this happenning to me before, at least not in the last 15 years.
Workshop with Keio University
On Monday and Tuesday we have had a special event: a workshop for PhD students where experimentalists and theorists from Delft come together with their colleagues from Keio University. Japanese goverment provides financial support (or, given the present state of affairs, perhaps provided) to Japanese students to attend such workshops.
Prof. Mikio Eto thus came to us bringing Takashi Kashimura and Ryota Watanabe, and Tomohiro Yokoyama was already these. Guess it was interesting for everybody since the program was really various.
Here it is for your information:
Monday
10:15-10:30 Opening: Profs. Yuli V. Nazarov (TUD) and Mikio Eto (Keio)
10:30-11:00 Takashi Kashimura (Ohashi group, Keio) “π-Josephson junction in a spin-polarized Fermi gas”
11:00-11:30 Ciprian Padurariu (TUD, Theory group)
“Superconducting spin qubits”
11:30-12:00 Peng Yan (TUD, Theory group)
“All-magnonic spin-transfer torque and domain wall propagation”
13:30-14:00 Ryota Watanabe (Ohashi group, Keio)
“Pseudogap effects on photoemission spectra in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of
atomic Fermi gases”
14:00-14:30 Vlad Pribiag (TUD, Quantum Transport group)
"The spin-orbit interaction in InAs and InSb nanowire quantum dots."
14:30-15:00 Tomohiro Yokoyama (Eto group, Keio)
“Spin-polarized current generation in quantum dot with spin-orbit interaction”
Tuesday
9:15-10:15 Prof. Mikio Eto (Keio)
“Kondo effect in quantum dot embedded in Aharonov-Bohm ring”
10:30-11:00 Mohammad Shafiel (TUD, Quantum transport group)
“Single-shot correlations and two-qubit gate of solid-state spins”
11:00-11:30 Mireia Alos Palop (TUD, Theory group)
“Adiabatic quantum pumping through surface states in 3D
topological insulators”
11:30-12:00 Dmitri Pikulin (Leiden/TUD, Theory group)
"Influence of topology on transport properties of superconducting junctions"
Ewold Verhagen
is an 31-year-old Dutch physicist with merits in optomechanics, a recently emerged brusting field exploiting the coupling of laser light and high-quality mechanical resonators. He’s visited our department today to check the opportunities.
Ewold looks yonger than he is till he starts talkinig: then you recognize he’s actually a mature scientist deeply devoted to his subject, and is ready to explain the importance of the subject for others. He’s got quite a number of prizes and awards: normally, this would corrupt a person of his age irreversibly. However, Ewold appeared to sucsessfully withstand the bait and is able to talk about with an ironic smile.
The talk was both clear and exciting. I was pleased to see a speaker who starts with Hamiltonians: he made clear that optics along with atomic/molecular physics still enjoyes an innocent harmomy between experiment and theory, a paradise long lost in the field of quantum transport. I wish him a full sucsess.
Re-flows
my article on the flows of Reneyi entropy has finally appeared in press, this is the link to Physical Review B.
Be yourself
From Lukas 8:
16 “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. 17 For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. 18 Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.”
This I read as: be yourself, while you keep the emitting abilities. Don’t try to adjust your light, so it looks fancier or more standard. Don’t try to hide or mask it if ashamed with it or not sure of its existence. Or?
Nicolas Gisin
has continued yesterday a tradition of star talks in our Department. Prof. Gisin is a pioneer of commercial use of quantum technologies and one of selected scientists who manage to enforce his own research agenda upon the rest of the world.
Yet it remains its own research agenda, and he has clearly demonstrated this in the course of his talk. For me, the most fascinating and valueable part was the first one where he talked about device-independent Quantum Key Distribution. Two other topics seem more optics-bound.
Manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations
in superconductor-normal metal tunnel nanostructures is a title of a new arXiv submission of me and my thrusted Finnish collaborators Matti Laakso and Tero Heikkillä. You can read it here.
In short, the paper is about making a commandable Maxwell daemon in SNS structures. Here is a detailed abstract:
We propose a mesoscopic setup which exhibits strong and manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations of energy and temperature when suitably driven out of equilibrium. The setup consists of a normal metal island (N) coupled by tunnel junctions (I) to two superconducting leads (S), forming a SINIS structure, and is biased near the threshold voltage for quasiparticle tunneling. The fluctuations can be measured by monitoring the time-dependent electric current through the system, which makes the setup suitable for the realization of feedback schemes which allow to stabilize the temperature to the desired value.
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