The book had a sheepskin cover, and mold was growing on the sheepskin. Robert Hooke, a pioneering microbiologist, slid the cover under one of the world’s first microscopes. Mold, he discovered, consists of “nothing elfe but feveral kinds of fmall and varioufly figur’d Mufhroms.” He described the Mufhroms in his treatise Micrographia, a 1665 copy of which I found in “Beautiful Science.” An exhibition at San Marino’s Huntington Library, “Beautiful Science” showcases the physics of rainbows, the stars that enthralled Galileo, and the world visible through microscopes.
Beautiful science of yesterday: An illustration, from Hooke’s Micrographia, of the mold.
“[T]hrough a good Microfcope,” Hooke wrote, the sheepskin’s spots appeared “to be a very pretty fhap’d Vegetative body.”
How like a scientist, to think mold pretty. How like quantum noise, I thought, Hooke’s mold sounds.
Quantum noise hampers systems that transmit and detect light. To phone a friend or send an email—“Happy birthday, Sarah!” or “Quantum Frontiers has released an article”—we encode our message in light. The light traverses a fiber, buried in the ground, then hits a detector. The detector channels the light’s energy into a current, a stream of electrons that flows down a wire. The variations in the current’s strength is translated into Sarah’s birthday wish.
If noise doesn’t corrupt the signal. From encoding “Happy birthday,” the light and electrons might come to encode “Hsappi birthdeay.” Quantum noise arises because light consists of packets of energy, called “photons.” The sender can’t control how many photons hit the detector.
To send the letter H, we send about 108 photons.* Imagine sending fifty H’s. When we send the first, our signal might contain 108– 153 photons; when we send the second, 108 + 2,083; when we send the third, 108 – 6; and so on. Receiving different numbers of photons, the detector generates different amounts of current. Different amounts of current can translate into different symbols. From H, our message can morph into G.
This spring, I studied quantum noise under the guidance of IQIM faculty member Kerry Vahala. I learned to model quantum noise, to quantify it, when to worry about it, and when not. From quantum noise, we branched into Johnson noise (caused by interactions between the wire and its hot environment); amplified-spontaneous-emission, or ASE, noise (caused by photons belched by ions in the fiber); beat noise (ASE noise breeds with the light we sent, spawning new noise); and excess noise (the “miscellaneous” folder in the filing cabinet of noise types).
Beautiful science of today: A microreso-nator—a tiny pendulum-like device— studied by the Vahala group.
Noise, I learned, has structure. It exhibits patterns. It has personalities. I relished studying those patterns as I relish sending birthday greetings while battling noise. Noise types, I see as a string of pearls unearthed in a junkyard. I see them as “pretty fhap[es]” in Hooke’s treatise. I see them—to pay a greater compliment—as “hairy mouldy fpots.”
*Optical-communications ballpark estimates:
- Optical power: 1 mW = 10-3 J/s
- Photon frequency: 200 THz = 2 × 1014 Hz
- Photon energy: h𝜈 = (6.626 × 10-34 J . s)(2 × 1014 Hz) = 10-19 J
- Bit rate: 1 GB = 109 bits/s
- Number of bits per H: 10
- Number of photons per H: (1 photon / 10-19 J) (10-3 J/s)(1 s / 109 bits)(10 bits / 1 H) = 108
An excerpt from this post was published today on Verso, the blog of the Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens.
With thanks to Bassam Helou, Dan Lewis, Matt Stevens, and Kerry Vahala for feedback. With thanks to the Huntington Library (including Catherine Wehrey) and the Vahala group for the Micrographia image and the microresonator image, respectively.
Quantum Frontiers 