The successful application of laser cooling techniques for cooling isolated vibrational modes of micro- and nanomechanical devices close to the quantum ground state has recently attracted a lot of interest in the control of macroscopic phononic degrees of freedom on a single quantum level. Beyond new possibilities to address fundamental questions in quantum physics, these developments also provide the basis for new, phonon-based quantum technologies. In this talk I will briefly outline some of the general prospects for the field of quantum opto- and nanomechanics and then discuss in more detail two specific examples, which show how the coupling of nano-mechanical systems to spins and photons can be used to probe macroscopic superpositions and to engineer mechanically induced photon-photon interactions. 

报告人简介： Dr. Peter Rabl is an Assistant Professor at Vienna University of Technology and the head of the quantum optics theory group. He obtained his PhD from University of Innsbruck (Supervisor: Prof. P. Zoller) in 2007. He joined IQOQI, Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2010 after postdoctoral positions in ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge. From 2013, he works at Vienna University of Technology. His main interests inclide: implementation of quantum information processing schemes in AMO, solid-state and hybrid quantum systems; cooling, state preparation and quantum measurement schemes; theory of open quantum systems, decoherence and noise evasion schemes; quantum control and applications of opto- and nanomechanical systems; and other related. Selected publications: PRL 113, 023603 (2014); PRL 112, 190402 (2014); PRL109, 013603 (2012); PRL 107, 063601 (2011); Nature Phys. 6, 602 (2010).