Welcome to the Quantum Measurements Lab!

In his famous Gedankenexperiment, Schrödinger contemplated a (poor) cat in a quantum superposition of two distinct states.

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But even if we could put a (plastic) cat into such a state, could we measure it? What about more complicated states?

Quantum mechanics tells us that any measurement disturbs the system being measured. This is expressed in Heisenberg's relation, one of the fundamental tenets of the theory.

In our group, we seek to explore the interaction between the system and the measurement apparatus, and to implement clever methods that surpass the quantum limits. Our main tool is using optical light to perform extremely precise interferometric measurements of carefully designed objects—which can range from macroscopic oscillators to trapped oscillating atoms.

Among our goals is to attain better understanding of the behavior of macroscopic objects in the quantum regime by "engineering" their motional state, and to apply these states in new techonologies such as quantum sensing and information processing.

In order to reach the quantum regime of measurement, we first have to eliminate any "classical" sources of noise. For this, we work at low (liquid helium) temperatures, employ extremely high quality oscillators, and use laser sources whose only flucutations come from the discreteness of light itself.