Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Recent experimental breakthroughs in several laboratories around the world have led to the construction of artificial super-conducting ‘atoms’: electrical circuit elements whose state variables (voltages and currents) are intrinsically quantum mechanical.   When placed inside a high Q resonator, these Josephson junction ‘atoms’ can strongly interact with single microwave photons.  This ‘circuit QED’ test bed for non-linear quantum optics has been used to generate single microwave photons on demand and other novel non-classical states of the electromagnetic field.  This architecture also has many promising features for quantum computation.  Recent experimental progress in the field will be described.

Biography:  Steven Girvin received his PhD degree in theoretical condensed matter physics from Princeton University in 1977.  After serving as a staff physicist at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) from 1979 to 1987, Girvin joined the faculty of Indiana University.  Girvin moved to Yale in 2001 where he is now Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics.  In 2007 he was appointed by Yale to the position of Deputy Provost for Science and Technology.   He works closely with the Yale experimental group of Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret developing ‘circuit QED’, a new paradigm of quantum optics and quantum computation using superconducting electrical circuits.  Girvin is the author of more than 200 papers in professional journals and has given more than 400 seminars and colloquia on his work.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Member, National Academy of Sciences; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Fellow, American Physical Society.  In 2007 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.