We're studying various things for this
but the two main areas of interests are
atomic clocks and quantum information
processing, quantum computing and
of course those things don't sound very
much the same but it turns out that the
techniques we need to develop for both
topics are very much the same.
On atomic clocks you're looking at
super positions of atoms and
these superpositions oscillate which, and it's
this isolation
from which we can derive a clock that as
we count cycles of this oscillation to define
units of time a second and it turns
out and I, in
quantum computing, quantum information
processing we also
rely on dealing with superposition
states
and in both cases for the clocks and the
quantum information processing you would
like these
superposition states to last as long as
possible.
Of course the idea of quantum computing,
quantum information processing
involves a huge number of people around
the world not just
and you know using atomic systems as we
do but
condensed matter systems,
superconducting
to josephson junction qubits and things like that.
I think as a group we're all hoping that
we can
get better control over these systems
and
maybe eventually actually do something
useful with them. So that's the hope and
on the other side as they say where, you know we
use these same techniques that make better clocks and
that we're actually using so we're
using some of the simple ideas of
quantum computing and quantum
information processing to help us
make better clocks and so that's
really happening right now.
