Many body quantum optics and correlated states of light

Dr Jonathan Keeling, University of St Andrews, UK

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Biography

Jonathan Keeling is a Reader in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics in the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance at the University of St Andrews.  Previously he held an EPSRC Career acceleration fellowship first in Cambridge, and then in St Andrews.  Prior to that he was a research fellow at Pembroke College Cambridge and a Lindemann Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Cambridge. He has worked largely on exciton–polariton condensation, and more recently has begun to work on many-body quantum optics in systems of cold atoms in optical cavities and of superconducting qubits in microwave cavities.

Professor Steven Girvin, Yale University, USA

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Biography

Steven Girvin is Eugene Higgins Professor of Yale University.  He has served as Deputy Provost for Science and Technology at Yale since September 2007.  In that role, he has broad oversight for all of the natural science departments within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Throughout his career, Professor Girvin’s research has focused on theoretical studies of strongly interacting quantum matter including such topics as the fractional quantum Hall effect and the superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition.  His research is currently focused on ‘circuit QED,’ which describes the quantum behavior of electrical circuits.  He works closely with the experimental team of Rob Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret at Yale developing circuit QED both into an architecture for quantum computation and as a novel platform for ultra-strong-coupling non-linear quantum optics with microwave photons and superconducting qubits acting as artificial atoms.

Professor Girvin has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  In 2007 he shared the Oliver E Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.

Dr Michael Hartmann, Technical Unversity, Munich, Germany

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Biography

Michael Hartmann studied physics at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München. In 2005 he obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Stuttgart for work on thermal properties of quantum systems on small length scales. As a Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Humboldt Foundation he then joined Martin Plenio’s group at Imperial College in London, where he started to work on quantum optical effective many body systems. Since 2008 he runs a research group funded by the Emmy Noether Programme of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at Technische Universität München. His main research interests are quantum optical effective many body systems, circuit quantum electrodynamics and optomechanics.

 

Professor Peter Littlewood FRS, Argonne National Laboratory, USA

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Biography

Peter B Littlewood is Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. He also holds an appointment as Professor of Physics in the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago.

He came to Argonne from Cambridge University, United Kingdom, where he was Head of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He previously headed the Theory of Condensed Matter group at the Cavendish Laboratory. During a 2003-2004 sabbatical leave, he was Matthias Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Prior to joining Cambridge, he worked at Bell Laboratories from 1980 through 1997, finishing his time there as head of Theoretical Physics Research.

His research activities include the dynamics of collective transport (charge-density wave, Wigner crystal, vortex lattice); phenomenology and microscopic theory of high-temperature superconductors, transition metal oxides, and other correlated electronic systems; and optical properties of highly excited semiconductors. He also has interests in theoretical engineering, including holographic storage, optical fibers and devices, and materials for energy applications.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences (Physics) and a Ph.D. in Physics, both from the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Institute of Physics, TWAS, and the American Physical Society.