SCV LEOS - March 2006 mtg

(Joint work with G. Beretta, HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA)

ABSTRACT

Light is a quantum phenomenon; the photon's 100-th birthday was celebrated last year. More recently, a quiet revolution in quantum-based technologies has begun to apply quantum mechanics explicitly to communications, cryptography and even imaging itself. You've already heard a lot about the first two areas, hence we focus on the third in this talk.

Significant cost reductions can be realized by implementing these quantum technologies in silicon. Our experience with VLSI design at Xerox PARC showed us the importance of having design rules to abstract away the underlying physics, thus allowing engineers to design chips. Since it has worked well for electrons, we have recently proposed an analogous set of quantum design rules (QDRs) for photons. Some example QDRs are: photons do not interact with other photons, and photons only interact with electrons (viz., the material comprising the imaging device). We will take a quick tour through all eight QDRs up to and including entanglement. Familiar concepts from classical optics such as Snell's law, refraction, diffraction, interference, are subsumed by our QDRs i.e., classical optics is just a special case of quantum optics.

Finally, we show what happens if you do not follow these photon QDRs. A special interferometer received a lot of press recently for apparently revealing a fundamental flaw in quantum mechanics. We have shown, however, that although the device is cleverly designed, its operation is incorrect because the designer missed a subtle phenomenon---photon bifurcation---which is a direct consequence of our QDRs. Our further research in this direction will be reviewed briefly. Thankfully, this talk will be illustrated with a multitude of diagrams.

BIOGRAPHY

Neil Gunther, M.Sc., Ph.D. is an internationally recognized consultant who founded Performance Dynamics Company (www.perfdynamics.com) in 1994 to provide performance analysis and training services for the management of high-performance computer systems. Worldwide clients have included AT\&T Wireless, Boeing, FedEx, Motorola, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, and Thales Group (Holland). Prior to 1994, Dr. Gunther held research and management positions in Physics at San Jose State University, JPL/NASA (Voyager and Galileo missions), Xerox PARC, and Pyramid/Siemens Technology. Dr. Gunther has Dirac number = 2 because he received his M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from LaTrobe University (Australia) under Prof. C. J. Eliezer---one of Dirac's four students. His Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Southampton (U.K.) was awarded for a thesis entitled "Broken Dynamical Symmetries in Quantum Mechanics and Phase Transition Phenomena". In 1996 Dr. Gunther was awarded Best Technical Paper at CMG, and in 1997 he was nominated for the A.A. Michelson Award. He is a member of the ACM, AMS, APS, CMG, IEEE, and SIGMETRICS.