Levitated Nanophysics Group

I wrote a short Viewpoint article for Physical Review X, giving an overview of some very exciting work in the field of nanothermodynamics, where researchers have surpassed the Carnot limit of efficiency.

I am extremely honoured to have received the Institute of Physics’ Bates Prize. You can read the citation here. It is a particular pleasure to belong to a list including my Master’s project supervisor (Mike Tarbutt), my Ph. D. supervisor (Matt Jones), and my close collaborator (Janet Anders).

I gave a lecture to celebrate, at this year’s QuAMP in Glasgow. It didn’t stop raining for one entire week, impressive Scotland! It was great to reconnect with the UK quantum physics community.

I have thoroughly enjoyed attending the Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation meeting at SPIE Optics and Photonics 2017 in San Diego. I delivered a tutorial lecture on Optomechanics and chaired a session on levitated optomechanics.

You can find my tutorial lecture here.

I had an great day hosted by Klemens Hammerer, giving a talk on our research and visiting various labs. I particularly enjoyed seeing a rocket which launched cold atoms into space, and the 10m LIGO prototype.

Very happy to speak about Rotational Optomechanics at the Highland Spring School on Mesoscopic Physics, organized by the Czech Academy of Sciences. AND it took place in a physics castle!

Our work on optical control of levitated nanorods has been published in Optica!

Kuhn, Kosloff et al., Optica 4, 356-360 (2017)

I am very excited to announce a new paper we have put online. By driving the motion of a levitated nano-rod, we have created the highest quality rotations ever observed. This has profound implications for force sensing.

You can find the work here: arxiv:1702.07565

Very pleased that our recent work on cavity cooling levitated nanoparticles has been chosen as a highlight in Nature Photonics!

Cooling Dynamics

We were very happy to visit the Zemánek Group at ISI Brno, to discuss future collaborations, and for James to present the latest results from Vienna.

Very pleased to announce that our work “Nonlinear Dynamics and Strong Cavity Cooling of Levitated Nanoparticles” has been published in Physical Review Letters as an Editor’s Suggestion.

This work smashes the record for cooling nanoparticles with an optical cavity, reaching millikelvin temperatures. We also uncovered some interesting non-linear dynamics along the way, which have important applications in future quantum physics experiments.