Colloquium

This talk is an attribution to celebrate Arthur Ashkin’s 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems. The talk tells how optical tweezers were developed into colloidal force spectroscopy (CFS), a method broadly applicable for the...

MIT Lincoln Laboratory develops a broad-range of high performance optical systems including laser communications, directed energy, radiometric detectors, chemical sensing, laser radar, and imaging systems in support of science discovery and National security. Strict pointing and image quality...

Quantum computing is a few decades old and is currently an area where there is great excitement, and rapid developments. One of the daunting challenges in developing a practical quantum computer is the need for a very large number of qubits. Neutral atoms are one of the most promising approaches...

Efficiently generating and projecting high power laser light from an aircraft presents a number of unique challenges that span multiple physics and engineering disciplines, including optics, fluid dynamics, mechanical engineering, open- and closed-loop controls, thermal management, power systems...

The visual performance of the common binocular is a surprisingly subtle and interesting topic.  Human vision and optical design interact in a complex way to determine binocular performance, invalidating simple estimates based on magnification.  Selecting the right binocular for amateur...

The rapid surge in manufacturing of nanostructured materials and significant advances in optical science open a wide variety of opportunities to field-test electrodynamics at true nanoscale. In this talk I will discuss the physics and modeling aspects of so-called hybrid nanomaterials, i.e....

Quantum information science (QIS) gives rise to unprecedented capabilities in sensing, computing, and communication. In this talk, I will first provide an overview of QIS and then describe our recent work on using entanglement, a unique but fragile quantum phenomenon, to improve the performance...

In the last decades, the developments in attosecond (attosecond =10^-18second) physics enabled the real-time studies of electron dynamics in matter. Tracing the electron motion in its native time scale becomes crucial for the accurate clocking of microscopic phenomena. The attosecond...