Ta-You Wu Lecture

Each fall, the University of Michigan Department of Physics hosts the annual Ta-You Wu Lecture, which is one of the most prestigious lecture events in our Department. The Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through generous gifts from the University of Michigan Alumni Association in Taiwan. It is named in honor of Michigan Physics alumnus and honorary Doctor of Science,
Ta-You Wu, one of the central figures of the 20th century in the Chinese and Taiwanese physics communities.

2013 Ta-You Wu Distinguished Lecturer

David Wineland

 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 
and 
2012 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Tuesday April 9, 2013
4:15 P.M.

 Blau Auditorium, Ross School of Business
University of Michigan Central Campus

Directions to Blau Auditorium

There will be a reception at 3:30 P.M. prior to the lecture.

Superposition, Entanglement, and Raising Schrödinger’s Cat

In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, illustrated his discomfort with the theory by pointing out that its extension to the macroscopic world could lead to bizarre situations such as a cat being simultaneously alive and dead, a so-called superposition state. Today, we can create similar situations on a small scale, such as putting an atom in a “bowl” and placing it on the left and right sides of the bowl simultaneously.

Superpositions are potentially useful for information processing.  For example, two energy levels in an atom, labeled "0" and "1," can be used to store information like the bits in our laptops.  However, as in the atom/bowl experiment, we can arrange the quantum bit to be in a superposition, thereby storing both states of the bit simultaneously.  This property leads to a memory and processing capacity that increases exponentially with the number of bits. This and a related property called “entanglement” would enable a quantum computer to efficiently solve certain problems that are intractable on normal computers.

Research on precise control of quantum systems occurs in many labs throughout the world, for fundamental research, new measurement techniques, and more recently for quantum information processing. I will briefly describe experiments on quantum state manipulation and atomic clocks that employ trapped atomic ions. This talk is, in part, the “story” of my involvement in these topics that I presented at the 2012 Nobel Prize ceremonies.

Biographical Sketch of David Wineland

Previous Lectures in This Series