Please join us in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Technological Institute for a Meet-the-Faculty Seminar with Professor Selim Shahriar, PhD, from Northwestern University.

There will be a brief reception post-seminar.

Abstract:

In recent years, we have been pursuing the development of a host of different opto-atomic quantum sensors in the Laboratory of Atomic and Photonic Technologies (LAPT), for practical applications as well as tests of fundamental physics. These include superluminal and subliminal lasers, slow-light augmented interferometers, arrays of trapped atoms for spatio-temporal holography, and maximally entangled Schroedinger cat states of atoms generated via spin-squeezing. Practical applications include precision rotation sensing, accelerometry and timing for GPS denied navigation, vector magnetometry, scale, rotation and shift invariant image recognition, ultrafast automatic event recognition, and hard-ware accelerated convolutional neural networks. Fundamental applications include precision tests of general relativity, violation of the equivalence principle as a signature of quantum gravity, non-linearity of quantum mechanics embodied in the Schroedinger-Newton Equation, and search for dark matter. This talk will present an overview of these activities.

Bio:

Selim Shahriar is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy (courtesy). He received his doctoral degree at MIT in 1992. He is the director of the division of solid-state, photonics and quantum technologies within ECE. He is also the founder of the Digital Optics Technologies, Inc. He has published 710 papers, including 335 in peer-reviewed journals. His work has been cited more than 144,800 times, and he has an H-index of 118. His research interests include Applications of Slow and Fast Light, Gravitational Wave Detection, Tests of General Relativity, Atomic Clocks, Atom Interferometry, Spatio-Temporal Holography, and Spin Squeezing. He was a co-recipient of the special breakthrough prize in fundamental physics and the Gruber prize in cosmology in 2016. He is a Fellow of the NASA NIAC program, SPIE and Optica.