The goal of our lessons is to familiarize the student with a quantum description of light; in particular it is aimed at introducing fundamentals in quantum optics and quantum information. Concepts such entanglement, vacuum fluctuations, second quantization and so on are indeed necessary in order to go beyond the classical Maxwell description. In our teachings, we aim at providing a survey of the progresses realized between Planck’s derivation of the black body distribution in 1900, and quantum teleportation one century later, not fogetting precise predictions regarding spontaneous emission (Fermi golden rule-30’s), the machinery of coherent states produced by a laser source (60’s) and the so-called second quantum revolution initiated in the 90’s. The tools that we introduce aim at giving to the student the ability to understand the most recent achievements in quantum information and quantum optics (entanglement, quantum cryptography, single photon sources, quantum tomography…).
Quantum information (11h)
qubits, entanglement, q communication, decoherence, quantum cryptography, biorthogonal Schmidt decomposition
Quantum optics - Part I (11h)
black body radiation, one mode quantization, coherent states, light-matter interaction, Fermi golden rule
Quantum Optics - Part II (6h)
Squeezed states, Quantum theory of beam-spliters, Quadrature opertators, Homodyne detection, Hong-Ou-Mandel effect