It is time to say good-bye to Ilya Starshynov, who just submitted his PhD thesis on “Quantum and classical correlations of multiply scattered light“, supervised by Dr Jacopo Bertolotti and Dr Janet Anders, and who is about to start a 1.5 year postdoc position with Prof. Daniele Faccio and the Extreme Light group at the University of Glasgow.
Ilya is currently still working on another publication to add to his collection of journal articles and conference proceedings [for example Quantum correlation of light scattered by disordered media (Optics Express); Non-Gaussian Correlations between Reflected and Transmitted Intensity Patterns Emerging from Opaque Disordered Media (Phys. Rev. X); Non-classical correlations of multiply scattered light (OSA Technical Digest)], and will still need to pass his viva in the next weeks, so we hope to see him again fairly soon for a catchup.
As an active member of the research community, Ilya presented his work at various national and international conferences and workshops over the past years, such as the SPIE Photonics 2016 (Brussels); Quantum Information and Measurement (QIM) – IV: Quantum Technologies (Paris, 2017); GW4 South West Quantum Technologies Workshops (2017, Cardiff); and the SPIE Photonics Europe 2018 (Strasbourg).
One of his most memorable moments occured at the last SPIE conference in Strasbourg, when he listened to a talk of Prof. Alain Aspect, who was noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement and elected as Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2015. Alain pointed out that quantum technologies became so widespread in recent years, that a taxi cab driver asked him if it is worth investing money in that area. An amazing insight in the impact science can have way beyond the academic community.
Ilya leaves us with a fond resume of his time in the CDT and hopes for the future we can only support:
“The CDT helped me to fulfil my dream of becoming a scientist. It gave me an opportunity to develop every aspect of a skill set required to become a successful academic and, most importantly, a network of contacts with the top researches within my subject area and beyond.
Thanks to the training we have had as a part of the CDT I was able to actively participate in discussions on topics that, only a couple of years ago, I didn’t even know they exist.
It was an amazing experience and although it is formally finished, I believe it is a beginning of a new bigger story of collaboration and partnership.“
Well done Ilya!
We look forward to seeing you again and hope that the research paths will cross with Exeter soon enough.
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Abstract of PhD thesis Quantum and classical correlations of multiply scattered light
Multiple scattering is a very common phenomenon since it occurs any time a wave meets a disordered medium. As almost any natural object has random structure in one form or another, the variety of the processes involving multiple scattering spans from electronic transport in solids to propagation of sound in a forest. In principle, multiple scattering is completely deterministic, and in the absence of absorption also reversible, which means that the information encoded into the incident wave can be perfectly recovered. However, in practice, due to its extreme complexity we often consider this process to be random, which leads to the information loss. Within this approach correlations can be an important instrument of information recovery, because they directly quantify the amount of knowledge we get about the wave in a particular point from the measurement performed in a different point.
In the first part of this thesis we study a novel type of mesoscopic correlations between the light intensities at the opposite sides of an opaque scattering slab. We study its dependence on the scattering medium properties and the incoming light beam parameters. In the last chapter of the first part we show how this correlation can be used to retrieve non-invasively the information about the shape of an object placed behind the scattering medium.
In the second part we switch to the quantum aspects of the light propagation inside the scattering materials. We show that certain class of quantum correlations, quantum discord, can be present in the multimode output state of the scattered light even when the input is classical (thermal). We propose a non-classicality measure based on the strength of this correlation, applying it to characterize the advantage due to the quantum measurement in discrimination of two coherent states in their mixture.