EDITORIAL The 17th Central European Workshop on Quantum Optics
Abstract
Although the origin of quantum optics can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the fundamental ideas about the quantum nature of the interaction between light and matter were put forward, the splendid blossoming of this part of physics began half a century later, after the invention of masers and lasers. It is remarkable that after another half a century the tree of quantum optics is not only very strong and spreading, but all its branches continue to grow, showing new beautiful blossoms and giving very useful fruits.
A reflection of this progress has been the origin and development of the series of annual events called the Central European Workshops on Quantum Optics (CEWQO). They started at the beginning of the 1990s as rather small meetings of physicists from a few countries in central-eastern Europe, but in less than two decades they have transformed into important events, gathering 100 to 200 participants from practically all European countries. Moreover, many specialists from other continents like to attend these meetings, since they provide an excellent chance to hear about the latest results and new directions of research. Regarding this, it seems worth mentioning at least some of the most interesting and important areas of quantum optics that have attracted the attention of researchers for the past two decades. One of these areas is quantum information, which over the course of time has become an almost independent area of quantum physics. But it still maintains very close ties with quantum optics. The specific parts of this area are, in particular, quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum cryptography, and the problem of quantitative description of such genuine quantum phenomena as entanglement is one of the central items in the current stream of publications. Theory and experiment related to quantum tomography have also become important to contemporary quantum optics. They are closely related to the subject of so-called quantum-state engineering. Different schemes proposed within the framework of this new area enabled the creation in laboratories of various superpositions of quantum states which had previously existed only as beautiful mathematical constructions by theoreticians. Connected to this, recent experiments related to such old problems as decoherence and quantum-classical transition are quite impressive. The same can be said about the interrelations between quantum optics and physics of ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates. Great progress has been made in cavity quantum electrodynamics, and the past decade gave rise to the new area of circuit quantum electrodynamics. Nowadays, we are very close to the observation of the quantum behavior of macroscopic bodies (mirrors), and the methods used in quantum optics help to achieve this goal. Quantum optics over the past two decades has resulted in such impressive discoveries as the slowing down of light to extremely low velocities and the creation of photonic crystals. The new methods of achieving very strong coupling coefficients between quantized field modes and atomic degrees of freedom open new possibilities for storing and retrieving quantum information transmitted by light. New areas of terahertz, femto- and atto-second optics were born or were significantly developed during the past two decades. In addition, the tomographic-probability representation of photon-quantum states has created new possibilities both in theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum optics. Traditionally, measured optical tomograms of photon states were considered as a technical tool for reconstructing the Wigner functions of quantum states. It became clear that these measured tomograms are primary objects; one does not need to reconstruct the Wigner function to extract information on physical properties of the state, for example, on the state purity. Purity is experimentally obtained directly from measured optical tomograms of photon states. The uncertainty relations for photon quadratures were also checked for the thermal photon state using experimental values of optical tomograms and avoiding the reconstruction procedure of the Wigner function and its associated precision constrains. In the tomographic-probability representation of quantum mechanics and quantum optics, tomograms are used for the description of quantum states as an alternative to the wave function and density matrix. The purity, fidelity, entropy and photon temperature associated with quantum states are expressed in terms of tomograms. This provides the possibility of measuring these characteristics directly by taking optical tomograms and checking basic inequalities like entropic uncertainty relations, temperature-dependent quadrature uncertainty relations, etc. The better understanding that quantum states can be identified with measurable probability distributions like optical tomograms opens new prospects in quantum optics, for example, to check experimentally the uncertainty relations for higher quadrature momenta and to control the precision with which the fundamental inequalities of quantum mechanics are experimentally confirmed. This Topical Issue is a collection of papers presented at the 17th Central European Workshops on Quantum Optics (CEWQO10) held at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, 6-11 June 2010. The other collaborators from different scientific centers who could not, due to different reasons, come to St Andrews but participated in the previous CEWQOs and plan to participate in future CEWQOs also contributed to this issue. The paper by Ulf Leonhardt and Natalia Korolkova, the CEWQO10 Organizers, opens this issue. The order of the following papers corresponds to the alphabetical order of the first author of the paper. The history of CEWQOs can be found in the Preface to the Proceedings of the 15th CEWQO (2009 Phys. Scr. T135 011005). The Proceedings of the 16th Central European Workshop on Quantum Optics (CEWQO09), held at the University of Turku, are also available (2010 Phys. Scr. T140). The 18th Central European Workshop on Quantum Optics (CEWQO11) will be held in Madrid, Spain on 30 May--3 June 2011. It will be chaired by Professor Luis Lorenzo Sanchez Soto from the Complutense University of Madrid. List of Papers The 17th Central European Workshop on Quantum Optics in St Andrews, ScotlandUlf Leonhardt and Natalia Korolkova Double self-Kerr scheme for optical Schrödinger-cat state preparation
P Adam, Z Darázs, T Kiss and M Mechler Relations between scaling transformed Husimi functions, Wigner functions and symplectic tomograms describing corresponding physical states
V A Andreev, D M Davidović, L D Davidović and M D Davidović Entanglement dynamics of two independent cavity-embedded quantum dots
B Bellomo, G Compagno, R Lo Franco, A Ridolfo and S Savasta Dynamical stabilization of spin systems in time-dependent magnetic fields
Yu V Bezvershenko, P I Holod and A Messina Entanglement dynamics of a bipartite system in squeezed vacuum reservoirs
Smail Bougouffa and Awatif Hindi On Wheeler's delayed-choice Gedankenexperiment and its laboratory realization
M Božić, L Vušković, M Davidović and Á S Sanz A smooth, holographically generated ring trap for the investigation of superfluidity in ultracold atoms
Graham D Bruce, James Mayoh, Giuseppe Smirne, Lara Torralbo-Campo and Donatella Cassettari Parametric amplification of the classical field in cavities with photoexcited semiconductors
V V Dodonov Mutually unbiased bases: tomography of spin states and the star-product scheme
S N Filippov and V I Man'ko Quantum trajectory model for photon detectors and optoelectronic devices
Teppo Häyrynen, Jani Oksanen and Jukka Tulkki Entanglement in two-mode continuous variable open quantum systems
Aurelian Isar A classical field comeback? The classical field viewpoint on triparticle entanglement
Andrei Khrennikov Experimental investigation of the enhancement factor and the cross-correlation function for graphs with and without time-reversal symmetry: the open system case
Michał Ławniczak, Szymon Bauch, Oleh Hul and Leszek Sirko Independent nonclassical tests for states and measurements in the same experiment
Alfredo Luis and Ángel Rivas On the classical capacity of quantum Gaussian channels
Cosmo Lupo, Stefano Pirandola, Paolo Aniello and Stefano Mancini Entropic inequalities for center-of-mass tomograms
Margarita A Man'ko Semiclassical dynamics for an ion confined within a nonlinear electromagnetic trap
Bogdan M Mihalcea Zeno-like phenomena in STIRAP processes
B Militello, M Scala, A Messina and N V Vitanov A beam splitter with second-order nonlinearity modeled as a nonlinear coupler
V Peřinová, A Lukš and J Křepelka Energy-level shifts of a uniformly accelerated atom between two reflecting plates
L Rizzuto and S Spagnolo Cross-Kerr nonlinearities in an optically dressed periodic medium
K Słowik, A Raczyński, J Zaremba, S Zielińska-Kaniasty, M Artoni and G C La Rocca An approximate effective beamsplitter interaction between light and atomic ensembles
Richard Tatham, David Menzies and Natalia Korolkova Stochastic simulation of long-time nonadiabatic dynamics
Daniel A Uken, Alessandro Sergi and Francesco Petruccione
- Publication:
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Physica Scripta Volume T
- Pub Date:
- February 2011
- DOI:
- 10.1088/0031-8949/2011/T143/011001
- Bibcode:
- 2011PhST..143a1001M