Matt Leifer, whose blog I hadn’t previously encountered, has a long and fascinating post on evaluation criteria for quantum interpretations. “Interpretation” here means the stuff of countless “Isn’t Quantum Mechanics weird?” books– Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian hidden variable theories, all that stuff. These are the “meta-theories” that are used to explain how you get from all… Continue reading How Do You Judge an Interpretation?
Category: Quantum Optics
How the Other Half Grades
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as… Continue reading How the Other Half Grades
Quantum Computing for Undergrads
Dave Bacon asks, I answer. Well, OK, Dave was asking how one would go about teaching quantum computing to CS undergrads, while what I provide here is a set of lectures on presenting quantum computing ideas to undergrad physics majors in my Quantum Optics class. But, really, isn’t that almost the same thing (don’t answer… Continue reading Quantum Computing for Undergrads
Lecture Notes Dump
Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff… Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement. Lecture 12: EPR “paradox,” introduction to Local Hidden Variables. Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell’s Theorem/ Bell’s Inequalities. Lecture 14: Bell’s Inequality experiments. Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
Lecture Notes Dump
For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here’s a bunch of lectures about photons: Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons. Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field. Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry. Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states. This material, unsurprisingly, produced… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
Lecture Notes Dump
Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here’s the next couple of classes worth: Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment. Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon interference. Sadly, this exhausts the notes I had written in advance (what with one thing and another, I… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
What I Do to Earn a Living
If you’re wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it’s because I’m spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way. I’ve mentioned before that I’m doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist’s approach to the material, but if you’d like a… Continue reading What I Do to Earn a Living
Class Notes
I realize that I’ve been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent… Continue reading Class Notes
There Are Worse Problems to Have
Next term, I’m slated to offer one of our “Advanced Topics in Physics” upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I’d rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead. I call myself an atomic physicist, and… Continue reading There Are Worse Problems to Have
Counterfactual Physics Blogging
OK, let’s say you want to explain something really difficult, like counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation, but you don’t want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let’s say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There’s a way to pull this off. What you do is, you… Continue reading Counterfactual Physics Blogging