Tag Archives: quantum noise

“Feveral kinds of hairy mouldy fpots”

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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.

Hooke image copy

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).

Vahala image copy

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.”

P1040754

*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.

Squeezing light using mechanical motion

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This post is about generating a special type of light, squeezed light, using a mechanical resonator. But perhaps more importantly, it’s about an experiment (Caltech press release can be found here) that is very close to my heart: an experiment that brings to an end my career as a graduate student at Caltech and the IQIM, while paying homage to nearly four decades of work done by those before me at this institute.

The Quantum Noise of Light

First of all, what is squeezed light? It would be silly of me to imagine that I can provide a more clear and thorough explanation than what Jeff Kimble gave twenty years ago in Caltech’s Engineering and Science magazine. Instead, I’ll try to present what squeezing is in the context of optomechanics.

fig1

Quantization of light makes it noisy. Imagine a steady stream of water hitting a plate, and rolling off of it smoothly. The stream would indeed impart a steady force on the plate, but wouldn’t really cause it to “shake” around much. The plate would sense a steady pressure. This is what the classical theory of light, as proposed by James Clerk Maxwell, predicts. The effect is called radiation pressure. In the early 20th century, a few decades after this prediction, quantum theory came along and told us that “light is made of photons”. More or less, this means that a measurement capable of measuring the energy, power, or pressure imparted by light, if sensitive enough, will detect “quanta”, as if light were composed of particles. The force felt by a mirror is exactly this sort of measurement. To make sense of this, we can replace that mental image of a stream hitting a plate with one of the little raindrops hitting it, where each raindrop is a photon. Since the photons are coming in one at a time, and imparting their momentum all at once in little packets, they generate a new type of noise due to their random arrival times. This is called shot-noise (since the photons act as little “shots”). Since shot-noise is being detected here by the sound it generates due to the pressure imparted by light, we call it “Radiation Pressure Shot-Noise” (RPSN).
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