Atomic clocks, surpassing a mind-boggling precision of one part in 1018, are the most accurate instruments ever made by mankind. The performance of the best clocks and other quantum sensors is limited by the quantum projection noise in the final readout measurement (standard quantum limit), but entanglement can be used to overcome this limit. A particularly simple form of entanglement is spin squeezing, where the quantum noise for the variable of interest, e.g., the phase of an atomic clock, is redistributed into another variable. I will explain how spin squeezing in an optical clock can be generated via light-atom interaction. I will also discuss the deterministic preparation of a large array of individual atoms with controlled interactions for quantum simulation, and potentially, quantum computing.
Professor Vladan Vuletić was born in Pec, Yugoslavia, and educated in Germany. In 1992, he earned the Physics Diploma with highest honors from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and in 1997, a Ph.D. in Physics (summa cum laude) from the same institution. He then went on to work with Professor Steven Chu at Stanford University as a Lynen Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation. In 2000, he was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford and in June 2003 accepted an Assistant Professorship in Physics at MIT. He was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2004, and to Full Professor in July 2011.
Awards include a 2003 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a 2012 Fellowship of the APS, and the Marko Jarić Prize of Serbia in 2013.