OSC Colloquium: Abbie Watnik, "Controlling Light in Uncontrolled Environments"

Ti:sapphire lasers offer the largest bandwidths and therefore the shortest pulses.   The highest laser intensities have been achieved using Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) of large diameter solid state lasers.  CPA was needed to avoid damage from the nonlinear process of self-focusing.  The disadvantage of solid-state lasers is the limited average power.  On the other hand, diode pumped fiber laser systems offer significantly higher average power than solid state lasers. Self-focusing is eliminated in single mode fibers by guiding and so nonlinear optics can be beneficial rather than detrimental and used to broaden the gain bandwidth.  Single fiber laser amplifiers will not reach the highest intensities offered by solid state lasers, but in this talk, I will discuss developing fiber laser amplifiers for nonlinear optical interactions such as mid-infrared generation and laser acceleration of electrons that require high intensity and benefit from high average power.

This colloquium will give a brief introduction to reservoir computing, an overview of its theoretical foundations, including the notion of a universal family of reservoir computers that is capable of approximating a certain family of nonlinear maps from input sequences to output sequences, as well as its inherent limitations. It will then motivate and touch on efforts by the speaker and his collaborators to exploit noisy near-term quantum computers as quantum reservoir computers. Finally, the colloquium will conclude with a discussion of research directions for further development of quantum reservoir computers as well as research trends in the broader recent efforts on engineered physical learning machines going beyond reservoir computers.

We will discuss the quantum limit of this free particle behavior, prospects for reaching sensitivities below the standard quantum limit of position measurements, potential applications in broadband sensing, and a plan for using a weakly-bound particle in a new precision measurement of G, the Newtonian constant of gravitation.