News

I attended the unwieldy DAMOP in Providence, Rhode Island this year. I was glad to give a talk about a topic new to this community, and to learn (or remind myself!) of the current challenges in the field of Atomic Physics.

I was very pleased to organize a very successful workshop on the quantum control of levitated systems on the 19th-20th May, in the beautiful town of Pontremoli in Italy. It was exciting to hear how far the community has come, work together on challenges, and glimpse the shape of the future!

I was really excited to be invited to a one day meeting on Optomechanics research in the UK. There are not many experimental groups, but the community is growing!

I wrote a review of George Musser’s “Spooky Action at a Distance” for Physics World. I gave a positive, if not glowing, review! You can read the PDF by clicking on the image below:

We attended the Gordon conference “Mechanical Systems in the Quantum Regime” in Ventura, California. This is probably the world’s leading optomechanics conference, and it’s good to see the progress since the last one 2 years ago. We presented the two posters below (click images to view posters).

I was very pleased to visit the Benson group at Humboldt University in Berlin. Just a short sleeper-train from Vienna! I am very interested in their work with nanoparticles in ion traps, and had the opportunity to talk to them about my work. Nanoparticle in a linear Paul trap, fromhttps://www.physik.hu-berlin.de/de/nano/forschung/nanoprobesparticles/nanoprobesparticles

Another slightly different paper… we did some work cooling really massive microspheres (micrograms) using their own Whispering Gallery Mode resonances, and it has just been published in Optics Express. Something easily big enough to see with your eye, cooled to a degree above absolute zero using nothing but light, amazing! Ying Lia Li, James Millen,…

My review article on Quantum Thermodynamics has been published in New Journal of Physics. It is a super-fast overview of the field, with a comprehensive reference list! James Millen and André Xuereb 2016 New J. Phys. 18 011002

As a nice start to the year, I have had an article published in the January issue of Physics World! It was written with André Xuereb at the University of Malta, and is called “Rise of the Quantum Machines“. The article explores the impact of thermodynamics on engineering at the quantum scale. The article was first…

The OSA organized an Incubator meeting on Levitated Optomechanics in Washington… which is just about the most topical meeting for myself I can imagine! I was invited, and gave a talk called “Size Matters”, exploring the role of particle size in levitated experiments. I also wrote a blog about it.