News

A new paper from my old group at UCL is online, demonstrating the world record level of cavity cooling for levitated particles, reaching millikelvin temperatures. The work also uncovers tuneable, true nonlinear dynamics. You can find it here: Nonlinear dynamics and millikelvin cavity-cooling of levitated nanoparticles arXiv:1511.08482

It was a pleasure to be invited to the Nanoscale Quantum Optics early research scientist conference in Malta. I gave a talk about working with nanoparticles, and very much enjoyed the diverse programme, including talks from EU funding bodies and journal editors… … plus, Malta is beautiful!

A trip to the UK this week. I visited Kishan Dholakia’s group at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, gave a talk, and was very interested to learn about their optical manipulation methods. I also took a drive down to Durham, where I did my Ph. D., and was very interested to see all…

I attended a Quantum Thermodynamics conference on the beautiful island of Porquerolles between the 12th – 16th October, where I chaired a discussion session on Implementations of Quantum Thermodynamics.

I wrote a short article for The Guardian on the prospect of doing quantum physics experiments with living things, called “A living thing in two places at once? This quantum quandary test is limited”.

A preprint of an overview of the field of Quantum Thermodynamics has appeared online here now. It’s a good summary for physicists!

Our work on using Whispering Gallery Modes to cool the centre-of-mass motion of “large” objects is up on arxiv here. We are able to cool objects tens-of-microns in size, and microgramms in mass, using light!

I visited Aurelian Dantan in the Ion Trapping group at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and gave a talk. I am particularly interested in their work on sympathetically cooling heavy ions, ions in optical cavities, as well as their new research on optomechanics.

Our paper “Quantum cooling and squeezing of a levitating nanosphere via time-continuous measurements” has been published in New Journal of Physics. In this work we describe how nanospheres in an optical cavity can be further cooled via feedback, and how their quantum state can be manipulated.

I was invited to talk at Innsbruck for an SFB FoQuS meeting on the 10th July. It was my first trip to Innsbruck, a town seemingly besieged by mountains!