News 23/04/12: Recent work on cooperative atom-light interactions
is featured in the highlights section of
Phyiscal Review Letters.
Background: After attending Oulder Hill
Comprehensive School
in Rochdale, studied Physics at Hertford College,
Oxford. I began working on lasers with
Dan Cassidy
at McMaster Universtiy in Canada. During my Ph.D. with
Allister Ferguson at Strathclyde, I
designed and built one of the first single frequency Ti:sapphire lasers
which subsequently become the
Coherent MBR110. As a post-doc I worked with
Juergen Mlynek in Konstanz and
Steven Chu at Stanford before beginning my own research group at Durham
in October 1995.
Current interests: In 2006 we began working on
highly excited Rydberg atoms.
In particular, we are interested in exploiting the large (long wavelength) dipoles
associated with Rydberg states to enhance optical non-linearities at the single photon
level, for applications in quantum optics and quantum information processing.
We first demonstrated the cooperative
enhancement of the non-linearity due to dipole-dipole interactions in 2010.
More recently, we have also begun looking at dipole-dipole interactions using only
shorter wavelength optical dipoles.
More information is available on the research pages of our
cold
and hot
atom experiments.
Other interests: Some clues may be found in this
blog or
photostream.
