Levitated Nanophysics Group

Read all about our technique to quickly, cleanly and efficiently launching nanoparticles into optical traps. Congratulations Maryam, Yanhui & James!

Direct and clean loading of nanoparticles into optical traps at millibar pressures
arXiv:2109.10316

We had a lot of fun running a 2-day Red Pitaya Hackathon, and achieved way more than we hoped for! Well done team!

Welcome to Nur & Sara, who will join our group for a couple of months as Summer Students.

Nur, who holds a King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship, will build an interactive electrical trap in collaboration with the artist Steven Claydon, and Sara will work with the optomechanics team on nanoparticle cooling software.

James organized a public engagement event associated with the UNESCO International Day of Light and the London Institute of Advanced Light Technologies (London Light). The public were invited to share short videos on the theme of light, you can see all of the entries at the London Light Instagram page.

This was followed by a panel discussion, The Shared Language of Light, featuring professionals from science, art, architecture and design. Check it out here:

James organized Lighting Up 2021, an 24 hour artwork formed by the shifting light across 6 continents, in celebration of the UNESCO International Day of Light 2021. A short version is shown below, but if you want the full 24 hours (!) you can see here, here, here and here!

We’re ready to combine optical tweezers with an optical cavity, to do some serious cooling of levitated nanoparticles, good work James S!

We’ve custom-built some miniature ion traps for our electromechanics project. Have fun Yugang!

An accessible review written by James & Ben Stickler has been published in Contemporary Physics. We consider what exactly you can learn by doing quantum experiments with big things, and outline how to do it.

Quantum experiments with microscale particles
Millen & Stickler, Contemporary Physics 61, 155 (2020)

This group has a focus on testing quantum physics using particles levitated in optical fields. Why do we use light? Well, because that was the only field on the block! Now we propose to use electrical fields and qubits to test the limits of quantum mechanics. Find a longer synopsis here.

Quantum electromechanics with levitated nanoparticles
Lukas Martinetz, Klaus Hornberger, James Millen, M. S. Kim & Benjamin A. Sticklernpj Quantum Information 6, 101 (2020)

Was happy to write a viewpoint with Brian D’Urso on amazing work from Copenhagen; greatly different degrees-of-freedom have been entangled, the spin of atoms and the mechanical motion of a micro-object.