The next generation of analogue gravity experiments

David is an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics of Cinvestav in Mexico City. He has held this position since 2015. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel working with Ulf Leonhardt. His research focuses on analogues of Hawking radiation in the optical and sonic cases, both as theoretical studies and in collaboration with experimental groups. He also studies the dynamics of ultra-short laser pulses inside optical fibres.

Yuval Rosenberg is a PhD student in Ulf Leonhardt’s group at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He graduated with a BSc in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2013 and with an MSc in Physics from the Weizmann Institute in 2016. As part of his doctoral research, Yuval aims to shed new light on the physics behind Hawking radiation by experimentally studying a fibre optical analogue of the black-hole event-horizon. Yuval had joined the group’s endeavour to measure the elusive analogue Hawking radiation already in 2014, during his master studies. He specialises in nonlinear fibre optics, and is fascinated by the elegance of physics, pure mathematics and the natural world.

Miles Blencowe received his PhD in quantum gravity at Imperial College in 1989. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College and the Universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and British Columbia, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College in 1999 where he is currently the Eleanor and A. Kelvin Smith Distinguished Professor in Physics. Miles' research interests range from investigating the quantum dynamics of opto(electro)mechanical systems to establishing possible fundamental limits on the lifetimes of macroscopic quantum superposition states due to gravitational decoherence.

Jack Petty is a member of the Experimental Quantum Optics Research Group at the University of St Andrews, UK. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Physics from the University of Oxford followed by a Postgraduate Certificate in Education also from the University of Oxford. He is now pursuing a PhD program. His research focuses on nonlinear processes in optical fibres, especially those which can be interpreted as an analogue to extreme astrophysical processes, such as Hawking Radiation, which lie at the interface of Quantum Optics and General Relativity. His work will help to provide the international Analogue Gravity community with experimental results from optical systems.

Jonathan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and a member of the Simons Modern Inflationary Cosmology collaboration. Previously, he was a postdoc at University College London. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto. He is broadly interested in early Universe cosmology, and connections between cosmology and cold atom Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). In particular, he works on the role of highly non-equilibrium and nonlinear processes in both cosmology and BECs using a variety of cutting edge numerical tools.

Ian B Spielman is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a joint research institute between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland (UMd). A member of the NIST technical staff since 2006, in 2014 Spielman was appointed as a 'NIST Fellow' (of NIST’s 1,800 member technical staff, just 40 are NIST fellows).

Spielman is an experimentalist in atomic, molecular and optical physics but was trained as a condensed matter physicist during his PhD at Caltech from 1998 to 2004. Spielman’s research centres using ultracold-atom systems – just 10s of nano-Kelvin above absolute zero – to realise the many-body phenomena so common in conventional materials. He has pioneered techniques to add artificial magnetic fields and spin-orbit coupling to cold-atom systems opening the door for new many-body systems. Spielman has received many awards on account of this research including the 2015 APS I.I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics.

Professor Schaetz studied physics at the Technical University of Munich and at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, with a diploma thesis on detecting extraterrestrial matter by accelerator mass spectrometry. Disappointed by its destructive detection and having learned that laser cooling permits freeze trapped ions to form crystalline structures in ion traps, he crystallised an ion beam in a miniature-storage ring in his PhD thesis. As Postdoc, Professor Schaetz had the privilege to work with Dave Wineland and Didi Leibfried at NIST/Boulder, to learn to improve the control on electronic and motional degrees of freedom of ions on the quantum level. Subsequently, he got an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and demonstrated that trapped ions are well suited to provide an experimental quantum simulator. In 2011, the group joined the University of Freiburg, eager to explore in close collaboration with theorists, under which conditions the intriguing effects of quantum mechanics might be experimentally simulated.

Ian Walmsley is Provost of Imperial College London, UK, and Chair in Experimental Physics. His research in optical science and technology ranges from ultrafast optics to quantum information science. Currently he is the Director of the Networked Quantum Information Technology Hub, the largest collaboration in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society (OSA), the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.

Theo Torres is currently a PhD student working with Dr Weinfurtner on hydrodynamic simulation of rotating black holes. Before starting his PhD he was a student at the University Paris VII in Paris, France. Theo Torres' research interests are mainly focused around black holes, modified gravity and quantum gravity. Initially trained as a theoretical physicist, he has however followed the idea of logical positivism by investigating these subjects from an experimental point of view by conducting various experiments to mimic black hole physics in a laboratory environment.

Elisabeth Giacobino is one of the pioneers of quantum optics and quantum information, with the first experimental demonstration of two-mode squeezing with an optical parametric oscillator in 1987. She showed the generation of squeezed and correlated light in a semiconductor microcavity. She achieved squeezed and entangled light generation and quantum state storage with cold atomic ensembles, with the first demonstration of a quantum memory for photons carrying orbital angular momentum. Recently she investigated quantum fluid properties of light in semiconductor microcavities, with the first demonstration of superfluidity and of quantum turbulence effects in microcavity polaritons. An important direction now concerns the use of polariton fluids for quantum simulation of systems of various nature, ranging from condensed matter to astrophysics.

Elisabeth Giacobino is the author of 230 publications, and she is a member of Academia Leopoldina, a fellow of EPS, EOS and OSA.

Daniele Faccio is a Royal Academy Chair in Emerging Technologies and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He joined the University of Glasgow in 2017 as Professor in Quantum Technologies and is adjunct professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. From 2013-2017, he was professor at Heriot-Watt University where he was also deputy director of the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences. He has been visiting scientist at MIT, USA, Marie-Curie fellow at ICFO, Barcelona, Spain and EU-ERC fellow 2012-2017. He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Physics in 2015, the Royal Society of Edinburgh Senior Public Engagement medal and the Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award in 2017. He worked in the optical telecommunications industry for four years before obtaining his PhD in Physics in 2007 at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. His research, funded by the UK research council EPSRC, DSTL, The Leverhulme Trust, and the EU Quantum Flagship program, focuses on the physics of light, on how we harness light to answer fundamental questions and on how we harness light to improve society.

Cisco Gooding is a Canadian theoretical physicist. He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Physics from Simon Fraser University, and then went on to complete his PhD in Physics at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Bill Unruh. His thesis topic was gravitational decoherence. Cisco then spent a year as a postdoc with Bill Unruh researching quantum gravity and analogue gravity experiments, after which he started his current position in the UK as a postdoc with Silke Weinfurtner at the University of Nottingham, where he continues to study quantum gravity and analogue gravity experiments. Cisco's other research interests include quantum information theory, cosmology, optomechanics, and fluid dynamics.

Germain Rousseaux is a CNRS research scientist with initial training in both Condensed Matter Physics and Fluid Mechanics at INPG, Grenoble Institute of Technology. After completing a PhD on the formation of sand ripples at ESPCI (Paris) under the supervision of José-Eduardo Wesfreid, he studied Nonlinear Physics with Pierre Coullet at Nice University, where he started his work on Analogue Gravity by performing seminal experiments on wave-current interaction in a coastal engineering company. Since 2012, he has worked in Poitiers on interdisciplinary subjects with a fluid mechanics initial impulse like Analogue Gravity, the Ancient Naval Battle of Actium, Tidal Bore Physics, Wave Resistance and the Physics of Ship Wakes with collaborators in Physics, Fluid Mechanics, Mathematics and Human Sciences.

Ulf Leonhardt joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as Professor of Physics in November 2012 after an international career. Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied physics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, at Moscow State University and at Humboldt University Berlin where he received his PhD in 1993. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Oregon Center for Optics in the US, a Habilitation Fellow at the University of Ulm in Germany and a Göran-Gustafson and Feodor-Lynen fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. From 2000 until his appointment at the Weizmann Institute in 2012, he was the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ulf Leonhardt also had various visiting positions: in 2008 he was a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore and in 2011 at the University of Vienna; in 2012/13 he was an adjunct professor at South China Normal University. Ulf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to receive the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006 Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy, business and research leaders of the world of that year. In 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2009 a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012 he received a thousand-talent award of China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Karim Thébault is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. His research interests are principally within the philosophy of physics, with an emphasis on classical and quantum theories of gravity, and within the philosophy of science, with an emphasis on scientific methodology. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London before completing his doctoral studies in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Before moving to Bristol he was an Assistant Professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Born in Winnipeg, and received his PhD from John Wheeler at Princeton University, he has been working on the overlap between gravity and quantum for his career. He has worked on black hole absorption, and radiation, how particles arise in Quantum Field theory, quantum effects in gravitational wave detection, testing quantum gravity in flowing fluid analogues, foundations of quantum mechanics, and many other like topics.