This grant funds the research of Professor Raymond Sawyer in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Sawyer's work concerns models of very compact and massive objects (neutron stars, supernovae), and is focused on the microscopic properties of the matter therein. Understanding the properties of this matter is critical to understanding how to interpret our observations of these objects. In the period of this award, Professor Sawyer will work to elucidate the neutrino physics that enters in the first moments of a supernova. He will also study the nuclear fusion rates in the interiors of very dense stars.
This research will also have significant broader impacts. Observational astronomy has long shared advances in detector technology and data analysis with industries and research groups concerned with terrestrial problems. Moreover, students trained in theoretical astrophysics have gone into many parts of the economy, bringing with them a broad education in basic science and often large-scale computing skills. Finally, this research is truly interdisciplinary, connecting diverse fields such as particle physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics.
The Investigator believes that the results to date, now addressing the final period of the grant, show much practical promise in the case of the published results on the interactions between the polarizations of two colliding photon beams. These results raise the prospect of obtaining, through the beam-beam interaction, a macroscopic quantum superposition of the net polarization variable of one beam with that of the other. Moreover, after interaction the separated beams can be taken anywhere without losing their mutual entanglement. This would be something of a holy grail in "quantum information science". But it is a long road from a theoretical demonstration to an implementation in the laboratory, so one must wait and see. Other results from the project, in the very different domain of Cosmic Microwave Background physics, should be of considerable interest in the field of cosmology. But perhaps the greater significance of the work is the fact that it stimulated work in a completely different field, described above. Indeed, going farther back along the path that led this way, in the case of this investigator, it was working for years on the subject of neutrino clouds from supernovae that established the basic methods of attack. .
