12 décembre 2017 – Soutenance d’habilitation à diriger des recherches de Sylvain Schwartz

Sylvain Schwartz soutiendra son habilitation à diriger des recherches sur le sujet « Nouvelles approches pour les mesures inertielles et l’information quantique avec de la lumière et des atomes ». La soutenance aura lieu mardi 12 décembre à 14h au Département de Physique de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (24 rue Lhomond, Paris 5ème) en salle L363/L365. Elle sera suivie d’un pot en salle E509 (5ème étage du hall D du Département de Géoscience).

Abstract
Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum physics has triggered many practical applications including semiconductors and lasers. In turn, some of these applications allowed physicists to gain more control on quantum systems, holding great prospects for a second generation of applications where the laws of quantum physics are harnessed at the elementary level. The research that I have been involved in at Thales then at Harvard University spans across some of these applications, namely laser gyroscopes, atomic sensors and quantum simulators. I will describe a new type of ring laser gyroscope that we have developed at Thales, based on a solid-state gain medium, with the aim to reduce the cost and increase the lifetime of these devices. I will also discuss some recent proposals of enhancing the performance of optical rotation sensors with slow and fast light. I will then move on to our project of atom-chip interferometry with thermal atoms, and discuss the potential applications in the field of acceleration measurements. Finally, I will describe the work that I have been doing at Harvard on a quantum simulator based on a defect-free chain of 51 neutral atoms interacting through their Rydberg states, which can be programmed and operated in a regime where classical simulations are no longer tractable. To conclude, I will present some future directions in the field of quantum technologies exploiting the synergies between these different projects.