On Thursday I had the privilege of an hour with Carlton Caves, who will need no introduction for anyone who is even a little immersed in the Quantum Information/Computation/... literature. As the introduction to his talk to the Yale Quantum Institute on Friday, yesterday, had it, Carlton Caves is a theoretician who crosses the divide into experiment very productively. Dwelling on his talk briefly, the first half of which was a review of black hole detection as it is, so that the second half could discuss the injection of squeezed light into the apparatus as a way to improve the signal response to gravitational waves. For me, put much too briefly, this is quantum noise engineering, which I loosely construe as why he expressed himself "keen" to see me after I cold called him a week ago (with subject line "Your visit to YQI next Friday, 14th September"):
Anyone who has followed my two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress on Facebook will recognize my hopeless heart-on-sleeve approach, which I am apparently unable to kick, even at age 61. He also mentioned that he had written a paper with Mankei Tsang a few years back, so of course I wrote back, trying as usual to make him think I'm a fool, enterprisingly misspelling Mankei's name as a first step, and telling him that I know nothing about the other thing he suggested he would like to talk about, quantum chaos,
I started this story with the happy ending that despite my best efforts we did meet. I took the first slot of two solid days of meetings with other people at YQI. It seemed to me to go really well, unless he was only being polite in making sure he had 1709.06711 safely squirreled away and saying a few nice things along the way, so of course there has to be a followup e-mail to make it as sure as possible that nothing good will come of it:
The attachments mentioned are now on Google Drive, 11 pages with a Wightman Fields focus and 58 pages that is perhaps a little more accessible (pages 54-55 are the two pages from this that I mention above). So now I have the joy of waiting, but also, more constructively but more difficult, of editing my "Classical states, quantum field measurement" to reflect what I learned from this. What I call a "random field" of comeasurable observables is rather similar to what has long ago been given the name Quantum NonDemolition (QND) observable, and even more so to what Tsang's & Caves' Evading quantum mechanics calls a Quantum Mechanics-Free Subsystem (QMFS):
They're working with quantum optics —or with the quantized free electromagnetic field, as I prefer to call it—, so we have a common starting point, but amongst the many things I fondly imagine of my work is that my presentation is so beautiful that it can't be immediately useful, in contrast to the rather extreme ugliness of almost all quantum optics that is practically always useful. Carlton tells me that their paper now gets about 15 citations per year, so it's a marginal but known quantity in quantum optics. I recommend their paper for its own sake, but also, of course, because this is my blog, as an alternative lead-in to what my Classical states, quantum field measurement tries to do —if you tried to understand my paper on its own terms but failed, let me know if trying to understand it through the quantum optics route works better for you.
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