Strong Light Matter Coupling From Atoms To Solid State Systems

The physics of strong light-matter coupling has been addressed in different scientific communities over the last three decades. Since the early eighties, atoms coupled to optical and microwave cavities have led to pioneering demonstrations of cavity quantum electrodynamics, Gedanken experiments, and building blocks for quantum information processing, for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2012. In the framework of semiconducting devices, strong coupling has allowed investigations into the physics of Bose gases in solid-state environments, and the latter holds promise for exploiting light-matter interaction at the single-photon level in scalable architectures. More recently, impressive developments in the so-called superconducting circuit QED have opened another fundamental playground to revisit cavity quantum electrodynamics for practical and fundamental purposes.This book aims at developing the necessary interface between these communities, by providing future researchers with a robust conceptual, theoretical and experimental basis on strong light-matter coupling, both in the classical and in the quantum regimes. In addition, the emphasis is on new forefront research topics currently developed around the physics of strong light-matter interaction in the atomic and solid-state scenarios.

Polaritonic chemistry is an emergent interdisciplinary field in which the strong interaction of organic molecules with confined electromagnetic field modes is exploited in order to manipulate the chemical structure and reactions of the system. In the regime of strong light-matter coupling the interaction with the electromagnetic vacuum obliges us to redefine the concept of a molecule and consider the hybrid system as a whole. This thesis builds on the foundations of chemistry and quantum electrodynamics in order to provide a theoretical framework to describe these organic light-matter hybrids. By fully embracing the structural complexity of molecules, this theory allows us to employ long-established quantum chemistry methods to understand polaritonic chemistry. This leads to predictions of substantial structural changes in organic molecules and the possibility of significantly influencing chemical reactions both in the excited and ground states of the system.

"This volume gives an overview of the manifestations of quantum coherence in different solid state systems, including semiconductor confined systems, magnetic systems, crystals and superconductors. Besides being of paramount importance in fundamental physics, the study of quantum coherence furnishes the starting point for important applications like quantum computing or secure data transmission. The coherent effects discussed mainly involve elementary excitations in solids like polaritons, excitons, magnons, macroscopic quantities like superconductor currents and electron spins. Also, several new aspects of the physics of quasi-particles are understood and discussed in this context. Due to the variety of systems in which quantum coherence may be observed, solid state systems are the natural candidates for applications that rely on coherence, for example quantum computer." --Book Jacket.

Advances in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, Volume 66, provides a comprehensive compilation of recent developments in a field that is in a state of rapid growth as new experimental and theoretical techniques are used on many problems, both old and new. Topics covered include related applied areas, such as atmospheric science, astrophysics, surface physics, and laser physics, with timely articles written by distinguished experts that contain relevant review materials and detailed descriptions of important developments in the field. Presents the work of international experts in the field Contains comprehensive articles that compile recent developments in a field that is experiencing rapid growth, with new experimental and theoretical techniques emerging Ideal for users interested in optics, excitons, plasmas, and thermodynamics Topics covered include atmospheric science, astrophysics, surface physics, and laser physics, amongst others

Comprehensive and accessible coverage from the basics to advanced topics in modern quantum condensed matter physics.

In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called ‘quantum enigma.’ This book opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s Cat box of the ‘quantum enigma’ after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework, a relativistic interpretation to advance a liberating quantum sociology. Deeper methodological grounding to further advance the sociological imagination requires investigating whether and how relativistic and quantum scientific revolutions can induce a liberating reinvention of sociology in favor of creative research and a just global society. This, however, necessarily leads us to confront an elephant in the room, the ‘quantum enigma.’ In Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, the first volume of the series commonly titled Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian toward Quantum Imaginations, sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that unriddling the ‘quantum enigma’ depends on whether and how we succeed in dehabituating ourselves in favor of unified relativistic and quantum visions from the historically and ideologically inherited, classical Newtonian modes of imagining reality that have subconsciously persisted in the ways we have gone about posing and interpreting (or not) the enigma itself for more than a century. Once this veil is lifted and the enigma unriddled, he argues, it becomes possible to reinterpret the relativistic and quantum ways of imagining reality (including social reality) in terms of a unified, nonreductive, creative dialectic of part and whole that fosters quantum sociological imaginations, methods, theories, and practices favoring liberating and just social outcomes. The essays in this volume develop a set of relativistic interpretive solutions to the quantum enigma. Following a survey of relevant studies, and an introduction to the transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framing the study, overviews of Newtonianism, relativity and quantum scientific revolutions, the quantum enigma, and its main interpretations to date are offered. They are followed by a study of the notion of the “wave-particle duality of light” and the various experiments associated with the quantum enigma in order to arrive at a relativistic interpretation of the enigma, one that is shown to be capable of critically cohering other offered interpretations. The book concludes with a heuristic presentation of the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of what Tamdgidi calls the creative dialectics of reality. The volume essays involve critical, comparative/integrative reflections on the relevant works of founding and contemporary scientists and scholars in the field. This study is the first in the monograph series “Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation” of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (XIII, 2020), published by OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). OKCIR is dedicated to exploring, in a simultaneously world-historical and self-reflective framework, the human search for a just global society. It aims to develop new conceptual (methodological, theoretical, historical), practical, pedagogical, inspirational and disseminative structures of knowledge whereby the individual can radically understand and determine how world-history and her/his selves constitute one another. Reviews “Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations, Volume 1, Unriddling the Quantum Enigma hits the proverbial nail on the head of an ongoing problem not only in sociology but also much social science—namely, many practitioners’ allegiance, consciously or otherwise, to persisting conceptions of ‘science’ that get in the way of scientific and other forms of theoretical advancement. Newtonianism has achieved the status of an idol and its methodology a fetish, the consequence of which is an ongoing failure to think through important problems of uncertainty, indeterminacy, multivariation, multidisciplinarity, and false dilemmas of individual agency versus structure, among many others. Tamdgidi has done great service to social thought by bringing to the fore this problem of disciplinary decadence and offering, in effect, a call for its teleological suspension—thinking beyond disciplinarity—through drawing upon and communicating with the resources of quantum theory not as a fetish but instead as an opening for other possibilities of social, including human, understanding. The implications are far-reaching as they offer, as the main title attests, liberating sociology from persistent epistemic shackles and thus many disciplines and fields connected to things ‘social.’ This is exciting work. A triumph! The reader is left with enthusiasm for the second volume and theorists of many kinds with proverbial work to be done.” — Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and author of Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge/Paradigm, 2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) "Social sciences are still using metatheoretical models of science based on 19th century newtonian concepts of "time and space". Mohammad H. Tamdgidi has produced a 'tour de force' in social theory leaving behind the old newtonian worldview that still informs the social sciences towards a 21st century non-dualistic, non-reductionist, transcultural, transdisciplinary, post-Einsteinian quantum concept of TimeSpace. Tamdgidi goes beyond previous efforts done by titans of social theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Kyriakos Kontopoulos. This book is a quantum leap in the social sciences at large. Tamdgidi decolonizes the social sciences away from its Eurocentric colonial foundations bringing it closer not only to contemporary natural sciences but also to its convergence with the old Eastern philosophical and mystical worldviews. This book is a masterpiece in social theory for a 21st century decolonial social science. A must read!" — Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, University of California at Berkeley​​​​​​​ "Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology succeeds in adding physical structures to the breadth of the world-changing vision of C. Wright Mills, the man who mentored me at Columbia. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can help us to understand the human universe no less than the physical universe. Just as my Creating Life Before Death challenges bureaucracy’s conformist orientation, so does Liberating Sociology“liberate the infinite possibilities inherent in us.” Given our isolation in the Coronavirus era, we have time to follow Tamdgidi in his journey into the depth of inner space, where few men have gone before. It is there that we can gain emotional strength, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Mandela empowered themselves. That personal development was needed to address not only their own personal problems, but also the mammoth problems of their societies. We must learn to do the same." — Bernard Phillips, Emeritus Sociology Professor, Boston University

As part of the commemorative book series on Singapore's 50 years of nation-building, this important compendium traces the history and development of the various sectors of Singapore science in the last 50 years or so. The book covers the government agencies responsible for science funding and research policy, the academic institutions and departments who have been in the forefront of the development of the nation's scientific manpower and research, the research centres and institutes which have been breaking new ground in both basic and applied science research, science museums and education, and the academic and professional institutions which the scientific community has set up to enable Singapore scientists to serve the nation more effectively. Each article is chronicled by eminent authors who have played important roles and made significant contributions in shaping today's achievement of science in Singapore. Professionals, academics, students and the general public will find this volume a useful reference material and an inspirational easy read.

Rapid development of microfabrication and assembly of nanostructures has opened up many opportunities to miniaturize structures that confine light, producing unusual and extremely interesting optical properties. This book addresses the large variety of optical phenomena taking place in confined solid state structures: microcavities. Realisations include planar and pillar microcavities, whispering gallery modes, and photonic crystals. The microcavities represent a unique laboratory for quantum optics and photonics. They exhibit a number of beautiful effects including lasing, superfluidity, superradiance, entanglement etc. Written by four practitioners strongly involved in experiments and theories of microcavities, it is addressed to any interested reader having a general physical background, but in particular to undergraduate and graduate students at physics faculties.