Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Quantum optics arose with the invention of the laser.  Early work focussed on developing a quantum theory of the laser and on better understanding the nature of the quantized electromagnetic field.  It was for this latter work that Roy Glauber won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics.  The fields produced by nonlinear optical devices also received attention, because of their unusual correlation properties.  In the 1980's two major areas of study were quantum metrology, using nonclassical states of the electromagnetic field to improve the accuracy of measurements, and micromasers and microlasers, optical devices that are pumped by a single atom at a time.  In the 1990's the field split into three parts.  Some researchers turned their attention to the study of Bose-Einstein condensates and related phenomena in matter-wave physics.  Another group pursued the newly emerging field of quantum information, while a third continued with work on mainstream quantum optics.  Today all of these efforts are alive and doing very well, and they have been joined more recently by the study of  quantum opto-mechanics.  A broad overview of these trends will be presented as well as more detailed discussions of some selected topics.

References: A good and readable book on quantum optics is Introductory Quantum Optics by Christopher Gerry and Peter Knight.  It doesn't cover everything, but it does give a good account of the basics

Biography:  Mark Hillery received a BS from MIT in 1973 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, both in physics.  He then spent 4 years as a postdoc, dividing his time between the Institute for Modern Optics at the University of New Mexico and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics.  He started as an assistant professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of CUNY in 1985, and became a full professor in 1993.  He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, and an associate editor of Physical Review A. His research interests are in the fields of quantum optics and quantum information.