Current Research Interests
Cavity QEDThe majority of my work during my PhD so far has been in the field of cavity QED. This field has seen a lot of activity over the last two or three decades, first as a testbed for quantum mechanics and more recently as a promising setting for Quantum Information Processing.
The main project I have been working on has been on preparation of entanglement using atoms in optical cavities. In particular, I have been looking into the possibility of extending a scheme my supervisor Dr Beige developed with Dr Metz which prepares an entangled state of two atoms ins a single cavity heralded by a macroscopic light signal. A paper detailing this scheme may be found HERE.
This main work aside, I am also interested in other effects that may be seen in cavity QED. I have been following recent progress on entanglement sudden death as a lot of this work is done on cavity based systems. A recent review on this topic has been written by Jaeger and Ann.
Previous Research
During my final year at Imperial I worked on a joint project with Dustin Connor entitled Trends and Fashions in Social Networks. We were interested in applying what we were learning in physics to social phenomena. This crazy idea actually turns out to be startlingly successful. The techniques used to study phase transitions in condensed matter physics can be applied to the formation of solid traffic jams from flowing traffic. For a really good book that describes many more examples in detail I would recommend Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
The project we worked on focused on applying computational techniques studying herding behaviour of individuals who were in some way connected in a social network. Previous work on this topic had produced a simulation involving a large number of agents who assigned themselves to different labels. The agents here could be considered as traders on the stock market where labels represent particular shares. The agents would always attempt to find and remain in rapidly growing labels. The resulting behaviour displayed the kind of growth and decay of labels that one would expect from the behaviour of financial markets.
The model so far, however, was limited. All agents had perfect information on all labels. Our task was to add a social network that defined which agents could communicate and share information. The type of network we used is a Small World Network made popular by the Six Degrees of Separation - Kevin Bacon game. The result of this addition did not significantly alter the behaviour of the agents demonstrating its robustness.
All the programming for this project was done in C++ making use of object oriented methods to create classes for the agents and labels. The only computing resource I had available to me at the time was my home PC so the simulations where usually run over night taking around 10 hours to complete a single run of the simulation.