News Archive
Wolfson Merit Award: Prof J.G. Rarity (Bristol)
Professor John Rarity has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Professor John Rarity has been awarded one of the Royal Society's most prestigious awards. Only 25 awards are given by the Royal Society each year to individuals of proven outstanding ability to undertake independent, original research. Professor Rarity exploits the uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics. He explains: “there comes a point when we have to accept that quantum mechanics is a good description of nature at the microscopic level, despite some bizarre properties. We can then turn these extraordinary properties to our advantage. This is the fundamental goal of our research in Bristol.”
The discoveries of Newton revolutionised our understanding of light and his ideas were refined by others (including Young, Huygens, and Maxwell) to form the wave description of light. This description was rocked by Einstein's discovery of the photon 100 years ago. This fundamental particle of light required us to take on board concepts such as wave-particle duality and entanglement. These counter-intuitive properties even worried the likes of Einstein. Advances in technology now make it routine for us to isolate and detect individual photons, to test their quantum properties and illustrate Einstein’s paradoxes in our Bristol laboratories. Key experiments show light behaves like a particle and a wave within the same experiment and that the properties of photon pairs can be strongly correlated even when they are separated by large distances (this is entanglement).
A key project that we are pursuing is a low cost secure key exchange system based on the wave particle nature of single photons. We aim to produce a hand held device that can ‘top-up’ a store of secrets at every visit to the ATM. These secrets are shared with the bank and so can be used to protect all your electronic transactions. In an opposite extreme we aim to demonstrate photon based key exchange over distances that take us to satellites to make a global key exchange system.
Manipulation of single photons and controlling interactions between them could also allow us to build a so-called quantum computer. Here in Bristol we are now trying to build the fundamental gates of such a machine. We are doing this by developing various optical and solid state based elements suitable for creating and manipulating single and multi-photon states. To ensure these devices work efficiently and effectively they have to be engineered on the wavelength scale. Wavelength scale devices will allow us to create photons and guide them to regions where they can interact strongly thus forming quantum gates. Another quantum property we can exploit for quantum storage is the spin associated with the magnetic moment of atoms and electrons. Spin does not interact strongly with the rest of the world thus is a good candidate for a quantum memory and for other quantum processing tasks. It can be manipulated by suitable illumination by photons and this is one of the directions we will research in the future.
At the dawn of the new century we are no longer verifying the laws of quantum mechanics but exploiting and engineering them into novel systems.
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