Absorption Measurements of Periodically Poled Potassium Titanyl Phosphate (PPKTP) at 775 nm and 1550 nm

The efficient generation of second-harmonic light and squeezed light requires non-linear crystals that have low absorption at the fundamental and harmonic wavelengths. In this work the photo-thermal self-phase modulation technique is exploited to measure the absorption coefficient of periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (PPKTP) at 1,550 nm and 775 nm. The measurement results are (84 +/- 40) ppm/cm and (127 +/- 24) ppm/cm, respectively. We conclude that the performance of state-of-the-art frequency doubling and squeezed light generation in PPKTP is not limited by absorption.

Transportable setup for amplifier phase fidelity measurements

One possible laser source for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) consists of an Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier originally developed for inter-satellite communication, seeded by the laser used for the technology demonstrator mission LISA Pathfinder. LISA needs to transmit clock information between its three spacecraft to correct for phase noise between the clocks on the individual spacecraft. For this purpose phase modulation sidebands at GHz frequencies will be imprinted on the laser beams between spacecraft. Differential phase noise between the carrier and a sideband introduced within the optical chain must be very low. We report on a transportable setup to measure the phase fidelity of optical amplifiers.

A proposal for self-correcting stabilizer quantum memories in 3 dimensions (or slightly less)

We propose a family of local CSS stabilizer codes as possible candidates for self-correcting quantum memories in 3D. The construction is inspired by the classical Ising model on a Sierpinski carpet fractal, which acts as a classical self-correcting memory. Our models are naturally defined on fractal subsets of a 4D hypercubic lattice with Hausdorff dimension less than 3. Though this does not imply that these models can be realized with local interactions in R3, we also discuss this possibility. The X and Z sectors of the code are dual to one another, and we show that there exists a finite temperature phase transition associated with each of these sectors, providing evidence that the system may robustly store quantum information at finite temperature.