Faculty Notes

Sept. 30, 2009  Kevin Jones, the McElfresh Professor of Physics, published, with colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a paper describing a novel experimental realization of an optical amplifier.  The device operated close to the fundamental noise limits set by quantum mechanics.   Jones and his colleagues used this new device to amplify a piece of a quantum state and studied the way in which this amplification process degraded the quantum correlations in the state.  The paper, “Low-Noise Amplification of a Continuous-Variable Quantum State,” was published in Physical Review Letters (PRL 103, 010501 (2009)) a prestigious international journal reserved for rapid publication of significant fundamental physics research.