previously offered internship topics
Open cavity to create exciton-polaritons in organic molecules
When a medium with an optical transition is placed in an optical cavity with high quality factor one can achieve strong coupling between the medium and the light field. In this regime we cannot treat the system simply by looking at the photons and excitations of the medium (e.g. excitons) individually, but rather have to treat them as new quasi particles – called polaritons. In the lab course your task will be to build and characterize such a cavity with mirrors of very high reflectivity.
Precision measurement of the nonlinearity of high-precision photodetectors
In our measurements testing the validity of Born’s rule in quantum physics [T. Kauten, et al., New J. Phys. 19, 033017 (2017).] we need extremely precise and linear, or in other words, extremely accurately characterized, detectors. In the lab course your task will be to measure and model the nonlinearity from a photo receiver using the beam combination method.
If two indistinguishable photons impinge on a beam splitter simultaneously, they always leave the beam splitter together. This effect was first observed by Hong, Ou and Mandel [Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2044 (1987)]. In the lab course your task will be to set up such a HOM experiment using the pair source from our experiment on the Bell inequality (FP2) and a fiber beam splitter, as well as to measure the HOM interference.