ABSTRACT: In this seminar I’ll tell the story of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) from first principles, building towards a new type of sub-micron waist resonator recently developed in the Simon/Schuster collaboration at Stanford. We will start by developing physical intuition for cooperativity, the figure of merit that controls performance of light/matter coupled systems including photon collection efficiency, cavity-mediated information exchange fidelity, and even coherence of interactions of photonic quasi-particle. Maximizing cooperativity will push us in either of two directions; (1) high finesses or (2) small mode waists. The high-finesse route is well explored by many leaders in the field of cQED, so I will emphasize the quest to small mode waist resonators, motivating near-concentric resonators, bow-tie resonators, and finally, our lens cavities. These lens cavities sport mode waists below a micron, entering the strong coupling regime at finesses well below 100. I’ll share preliminary data demonstrating single-atom coupling to such a cavity, and a test-bench demonstration of an array of small waist cavities that we intend to integrate with an atom array.

Bio: Jon graduated from Montgomery Blair HS in 2000; Caltech in 2004, and MIT/Harvard in 2010; he was faculty at the University of Chicago from 2012-2022 in Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and since then has been faculty at Stanford in Physics and Applied Physics.

Jon loves to fly drones, kitesurf, ride his electric skateboard, and grapple. He is a cat afficionado and a very amateur chess player. If you want to make a cool robot, he's probably game; if it's a space robot, even better, but then the Schusterlab will also probably want in.

This seminar is sponsored by the Department of Applied Physics and the Ginzton Laboratory