Caltech Professor Receives German Award for Laser Innovations

H. Jeff Kimble, Valentine Professor and professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has been chosen by the private non-profit German foundation Berthold Leibinger Stiftung as the initial recipient of its new Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis ("Future Prize"). To be presented every two years, the prize is intended to honor "outstanding milestones in research" related to laser light and carries an award of 20,000 euros (approximately $25,000). The jury recognized Kimble "for his groundbreaking experiments in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics," which form "an essential foundation for quantum information technology...a key technology of the 21st century." Kimble's group studies the quantum mechanics of open systems, and his experiments are basic investigations of the nature of the interaction of light and matter. He said he chose cavity quantum electrodynamics as one of the few experimentally viable systems in which "the intrinsic quantum mechanical coupling dominates losses due to dissipation." Kimble is interested in transforming fundamental physical processes into scientific tools for advancing quantum information science, with applications ranging from quantum metrology to the processing and distribution of quantum information. In 1997 Kimble and his colleagues proposed and analyzed a "quantum Internet" composed of nodes capable of storing and manipulating quantum mechanical states and channels for linking the nodes together in a fully coherent fashion. The network could have nodes consisting of atoms trapped in optical cavities and channels formed by fiber-optic links carrying single-photon states. More recently his research group built a single-atom laser and observed photon blockade, where a first photon in an atom-cavity system blocks the passage of a second photon.