#WIDOMSUMVAC — TOKYO: DAY 1

I have now been in the Tokyo airport three times in three weeks! Returned again last night to visit Drs. Masahide Sasaki and Masahiro Takeoka and their colleagues at the Quantum ICT Advanced Development Center, at the Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). My two LSU PhD students, Haoyu Qi and Zhihao Xiao, are already here about mid-way through their eight-week summer research collaboration. It was good to catch up on old work and new work and today we began hammering out the research plan for the next two weeks I am here. QICT has a very close integration with theory and experiment and I'm looking forward to learning a lot and expanding our current collaboration which is now formalized by a Memorandum of Understanding. 

Come to LSU to do your PhD in our Quantum Science and Technologies group and can get to spend your summer in Shanghai, Tokyo, or Los Angeles near the beach!

Discussions today ranged over entanglement assisted channel capacities using two-mode squeezed vacuum, as well as tomography on superconducting qubits coupled to an LC circuit. 

After a 12 hour flight I relax with sushi, wine, and Japanese soap operas.

Colonel Sanders always greets me on my trips here.

Dr. Yoshiaki Tsujimoto explains the downconversion experiment.

Debate rages over the potential applications.

#WIDOMSUMVAC — BATON ROUGE: DAY TWO!

After the Dean's office requested I post my summer adventures in a blog, I'd focused on not being at LSU for the past three weeks, but I'm back this week to meet all of the summer students and make mid-course corrections on their projects.

QST Meeting at LSU!

The projects include:

The Return of Quantum Atomic Clock Synchronization!

Catching the Wave of the Quantum Internet!

This Ain't Your Grandma's Squeezed Vacuum!

Room-Temperature Photon-Number-Resolving Detection Without Room-Temperature Photon-Number-Resolving Detectors!

Super-Duper Resolution!

What the Heck is Written on the Board!?

In addition to the left-behind PhD students who are not away this summer we have summer undergrads; Osa Adun, David Lawrence, Kenji Arai, Corey Matyas, Samara Levy, Tony Mirasola, and High School Students; Mary Catherine Lorio, Deepti Vaidyanathan, and Jefferson Koonce, funded under the NSF REU program and the US Army AEOP programs. 

#WIDOMSUMVAC — OKINAWA DAY THREE!

Wonderful discussions and new physics ideas at OIST. Friday I had a chance to hear from the theory students in the group of Thomas Busch! Many experimental puzzles, many theoretical solutions, and all is very exciting. I look forward to return for two weeks in April!

Group photo of the AMO experimentalists and friends.

The aftermath.

Who invented the pushme-pullyou trap?

Finally. Theorists!

Theory selfie.

Sasha has too many levels.

Kind of a Hibachi place.

Tritium, center, is radioactive.

They don't throw the food at you.

Thomas appears surpised.

Sile seems dubious.

A minute later it grabbed my face and implanted me with an alien.

Okay. Who left torpedos in the parking lot again.

Vanilla Air is very Plane.

#WIDOMSUMVAC — OKINAWA DAY ONE!

After the somewhat grueling 24-hour flight from Baton Rouge to Okinawa, I arrived late Tuesday night local time. Given that I had just spent two weeks in Shanghai, which is only an hour different than here, I'm not jet lagged! Having missed dinner all together Tuesday evening, I raced down to the OIST cafeteria for breakfast Wednesday morning, which consisted of three slices of pizza, a boiled egg, a glass of orange juice, and a double-shot latte. I may not be regular again until the next Clinton administration.

At 9AM sharp Prof. Síle Nic Chormaic's postdoc, Dr. Jinjin Du, gave us a short tour of the local part of the island and then we had lab tours and discussions from 11AM until about 12:30PM, another break for pizza and coffee, and then back for more discussion on the transfer of higher-order modes of light through fibers to couple nonlinearly with neutral atoms — does LSU have a theory for that!

The Prof. Irina Novikova, my long-time collaborator gave the experimental version of our collaboration in a nice seminar on the generation of multimode squeezed light in rubidium vapor. 

I will give the theory version of our collaboration tomorrow in a not so nice seminar. Next Síle (pronounced "Shelia" will be taking us out for local cuisine — Italian / Spanish / French food with local ingredients. Then tomorrow we do it all over again! 

My lovely little cottage on a cliff.

View from my back porch.

What have you done with my pet bottle, Cecil!?

A used TOKAMAK that doubles as a tunnel?

Eggxactly what the doctor ordered?

OIST on approach.

OIST koi pond.

Hoist?

Left to right: Alexandre Akoulchine, Irina Novikova, JinJin Du.

"You can't take a photo of a hole — it is an absence of matter!"

A relic from 1947?

I can't define a photon, but I know one when I see one.

Laser-cooled Rubidium atoms interact with an optical fiber.

OIST PhD Student, Thomas Nieddu, explains why it is all very "cool".

Irina regales us with tales of experiments for multimode squeezed light

View from my office.

Fundamental precision limit of a Mach-Zehnder interferometric sensor when one of the inputs is the vacuum

Masahiro Takeoka, Kaushik P. Seshadreesan, Chenglong You, Shuro Izumi, Jonathan P. Dowling

(Submitted on 26 May 2017)

In the lore of quantum metrology, one often hears (or reads) the following no-go theorem: If you put vacuum into one input port of a balanced Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, then no matter what you put into the other input port, and no matter what your detection scheme, the sensitivity can never be better than the shot noise limit (SNL). Often the proof of this theorem is cited to be in Ref. [C. Caves, Phys. Rev. D 23, 1693 (1981)], but upon further inspection, no such claim is made there. A quantum-Fisher-information-based argument suggestive of this no-go theorem appears in Ref. [M. Lang and C. Caves, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 173601 (2013)], but is not stated in its full generality. Here we thoroughly explore this no-go theorem and give the rigorous statement: the no-go theorem holds whenever the unknown phase shift is split between both arms of the interferometer, but remarkably does not hold when only one arm has the unknown phase shift. In the latter scenario, we provide an explicit measurement strategy that beats the SNL. We also point out that these two scenarios are physically different and correspond to different types of sensing applications.

Cite as:	arXiv:1705.09506 [quant-ph]

#WIDOMSUMVAC — SHANGHAI: DAY 13!

It's Saturday afternoon in Shanghai and my flight to Dallas boards in an hour. Only 12 hours it looks. Great excitement and fun and research with Tim Byrnes at NYU Shanghai. Here is our farewell shot. 

We celebrate with sparkling grape juice!

When I arrived on Monday we made a to-do list and then when we pulled it up on Friday we could tick off many things, delete many things, and add new things. All in all in this two-week period we have either submitted or resubmitted or nearly submitted five refereed publications. Two per day!

Here are some parting shots of the NYU gang. 

Dr. Chandrasekar apparently has no limits.

Randomness.

The Qubit Caballero discovers inside is sticky rice filled with either sweet red-bean paste or savory meat paste.
It's Schrödinger's Dumpling!

Traditional last night dinner at the Wolf Factory.
Lamb shishkabops!

Last elevator ride. But where's Chenyu?

THERE she is!

Home in Baton Rouge for 24 hours then off AM Monday on a 24 hour flight to Okinawa where I'll visit OIST and the group of  fellow Irish person Sile Nic Chormaic (Sheila) along with our long-time collaborator, Irina Novikova at William & Mary College. We will discuss orbital angular momentum states of light interacting with nonlinear optical media! 

OIST! Rhymes with MOIST?

Stay tuned for #WIDOMSUMVAC — OKINAWA: DAY 1!