Prof. Manjavacas Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award
April 23, 2020
Professor Alejandro Manjavacas has been awarded a five-year NSF CAREER award for a project entitled Transfer of Momentum and Energy in the Nanoscale Using Quantum and Thermal Fluctuations. This unique project takes advantage of the quantum nature of the interaction of light and matter to develop possible new applications in nanotechnology. The work should point toward new ways of manipulating objects on the nanoscale, including in biological settings, as well as improvements in design of thermophotovoltaic devices and heat management in nanoelectronics.

Measurement-based feedback control enables quantum simulation of the chaotic quantum-to-classical transition
April 21, 2020
In classical mechanics chaos in a dynamical system is related to the unpredictability arising from high sensitivity to the initial configuration. The question of how this behavior, based on the notion of trajectories on phase space, is recovered from the macroscopic limit of the dynamics of quantum systems is a long standing question in theoretical physics. About 20 years ago, in pioneering work, a group of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories [1] investigated the role of quantum measurement as the mechanism enabling the definition of quantum trajectories on phase space, hence allowing  the emergence of chaos from quantum dynamics.

Becerra Chavez publishes Low Power Light article in Nature Partner Journals
April 17, 2020
Light has intrinsic quantum noise, which limits how well we can measure it, especially at low powers, and bounds how much information we can communicate. A team led by F. Elohim Becerra at the University of New Mexico demonstrated optimized measurements for light pulses with different phases at low powers, such as those used in coherent optical communication.