#WIDOMSUMVAC — SHANGHAI DAY SEVEN

As promised the highlight of the week was visiting the labs of Profs. C.-Y. Lu and J.-W. Pan at USTC Shanghai. Prof. Lu was our gracious host.

LSU-NYU-USTC Collaboration!

Upon arrival, me, Tim Byrnes, and students Chenglong You, Sushovit Adhikari, and Naeime Mohseni, watch some slides and videos of the satellite in action including the pointing and tracking carried out by several laser beams.We then gave a presentation on our latest results on quantum metrology.

 Chinese quantum satellite in action — pointing and tracking. 

Red goes up from ground and green comes from satellite.

  Chenglong explains quantum metrology and we propose a new experiment.

The satellite is able to carry our Earth to Space quantum cryptography as well as distributing entanglement to remote round stations as tests of quantum theory over large distances. Apparently the satellite is responding much better than anticipated and they will publish data soon.

I had promised the students we would see the duplicate of the quantum Chinese satellite Mozi, but when we went into the satellite assembly room in quite a funny moment Prof. Lu threw up his hands and yelled, “WHERE IS THE SATELLITE!?” Apparently it had been moved to a new location the night before.

 Where is the satellite!? Chenglong "The Photo Bomber" (left) and Prof. Lu (right).

 What it looked like before it went missing.

After losing the satellite we had a tour of the cold-atom labs and then the photonics lab where LSU is collaborating with USTC on experiments on boson-sampling-inspired quantum metrology. The experiments are finished so expect exciting results soon. 

Sodium lasers cool and trap the atoms. Chenglong bombs the photo.

Lab tour at USTC: Chenglong, Sushovit, Tim.

The boson sampler in action. The foggy plate is an all optical quantum computer.

Lasers the run the show.

They won't let me push any buttons!

Then after the lab tours we were all invited to a nice dinner by Prof. Lu and we toasted to future collaborations — Gānbēi!

The stuff in the glasses is maotai which was used to fuel the rocket that launched the satellite.