This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award is for an equipment acquisition program to establish the LAMP Facility at MIT, to provide intense, ultra-stable, optical sources from the near ultraviolet to the infrared frequency range, referenced to optical frequency combs anchored to an absolute frequency standard. The equipment is composed of three subsystems: the master frequency comb, the intense frequency locked light sources, and the interface lasers. The master comb will employ Ti:Sapphire laser based combs, fiber laser combs, and existing frequency references; the light sources will employ lasers at wavelengths ranging from 323nm to 1.5μm; and the interface lasers will employ lasers for creation of atomic and solid state systems which can be coherently controlled.
LAMP builds on two major NSF programs at MIT, the Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA), a Physics Frontier Center, and Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and Engineering, an Integrative Graduate Education, Research, and Training (IGERT) program; together, these activities span five departments and involve over ~100 students and staff. The facility will enable major new explorations at the frontier of quantum science, including the realization of new quantum systems made of polar molecules, which have strong dipole-dipole interactions. At nanokelvin temperatures, these molecules may form a new form of matter, a supersolid, allowing studies of nanokelvin chemistry, providing qubits for quantum information science with distinct advantages over other approaches to quantum gates. LAMP also allows novel manipulations of cold ions in cryogenic ion trap, bringing this research to the next level, the realization of large-scale quantum computers, and long-distance, coherent quantum interconnects.
The broader aspects of the LAMP facility include reaching out to the broad research and teaching community through LAMP LITE, a technical exchange program for researchers to access the instrument, and through enhancement of established efforts such as the CUA Teaching Opportunities in Physical Sciences program involving high school students and prospective high school teachers. LAMP is also made available to students from minority institutions.
. It benefited two major NSF funded activities at MIT, the Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA), a Physics Frontier Center, and the Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and Engineering (iQuISE) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program at MIT. These two activities span five departments, crossing the schools of Science and Engineering, and involving over a dozen faculty and ~100 graduate and undergraduate students. Both programs push the frontiers of quantum science by using ultracold atoms to realize new forms of matter or by controlling and manipulating quantum systems for quantum information science. The laser acquisition and modernization program provided central infrastructure to our programs by shared frequency combs which provide an ultrastable frequency reference for multiple laboratories. In addition, instruments like a fiber fusion splicer, a glass fiber processor, and an optical vector analyzer were purchased; these are powerful tools shared by multiple research groups to fabricate and characterize critical optical components. Lasers were also acquired which allow more efficient preparation of various quantum systems, including sodium Bose-Einstein condensates, nitrogen vacancy centers, polar molecules, and trapped ions. For instance, before the LAMP acquisitions, sodium Bose-Einstein condensates were produced with dye lasers, a forty year old technology which required time consuming alignment and maintenance. The new solid state lasers have almost completely eliminated these tasks, and several laboratories at MIT can now pursue research on new states of ultracold quantum matter with increased productivity, as demonstrated already by several high-impact publications. The laser modernization will accelerate, enhance and expand the work done in two major NSF funded activities at MIT, enabling major new explorations at the frontier of quantum science. Equally important, it helps to train students in the CUA and student trainees in the iQuISE IGERT program and prepares them for careers in science and technology. The LAMP facility and faculty have also reached out to involve the general public, through efforts involving artists and high school students and teachers. One very memorable collaboration involved artist Trevor Paglen, working with NSF-funded IGERT trainee Adam McCaughan and faculty member Karl Berggren, to produce "The Last Pictures," a collection of 100 images, meant to outlast humanity's time on Earth. Adam etched the images into a silicon wafer at the MIT Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication lab, using a LAMP facility laser pattern generator in the process. On November 20, 2012, this wafer was launched aboard a rocket from Kazhakstan on a satelite put into geosynchronous orbit, where it is expected to survive at least until the Sun becomes a red dwarf, 5 billion years in the future.
