Twisting the Quantum

Charles W. Clark     NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology)  

Oct. 13, 2016 at 3:30 PM in Rm. 109 Nicholson Hall.  Host by Jonathan Dowling

Wave motions in nature were known to the ancients, and their mathematical expression in physics today is essentially the same as that first provided by d'Alembert and Euler in the mid-18th century. Yet it was only in the early 1990s that physicists managed to control a basic property of light waves: their capability of swirling around their own axis of propagation. During the past decade such techniques of control have also been developed for quantum particles: atoms, electrons and neutrons.
Dr. C will present a simple description of these phenomena, emphasizing the most basic aspects of wave and quantum particle motion, and showing how these are used in their recent work on twisting neutron wavefunctions [1-3].
1. “Controlling Neutron Orbital Angular Momentum,” C. W. Clark, R. Barankov, M. G. Huber, M. Arif, D. G. Cory and D. A. Pushin, Nature 525, 504 (2015)

2.“Spin-orbit states of neutron wave packets,” J. Nsofini, D. Sarenac, C. J. Wood, D. G. Cory, M. Arif, C. W. Clark, M. G. Huber, and D. A. Pushin, Phys. Rev. A 94, 013605 (2016)

3. “Holography with a neutron interferometer,” D. Sarenac, M. G. Huber, B. Heacock, M. Arif, C. W. Clark, D. G. Cory, C. B. Shahi and D. A. Pushin, Optics Express 24, 22528 (2016)