Introduction to the World of Quantum
Middle school lesson plans on using lasers and magnets to cool down atoms and make new states of matter
Key question: What is a scientific model and how do we create one?
Key questions: What models best explain the behavior of light? Does light behave like a wave, a particle, neither, or both?
Key question: How are quantum logic gates different from the logic gates used in normal computers?
Key question: How does a quantum computer work?
Deborah Jin: Leading the Charge in Quantum Computing
Physics Family
Deborah Shui-Lan Jin was born November 15, 1968 into a physics family: her parents were both physicists. She was one of three children, and one of two who would become a physicist, along with her brother also studied physics. Growing up in Florida near where her father was a professor, Jin competed in—and won—many math competitions. She also felt inspired by her parents from a young age to learn more about physics. Jin went to Princeton University to study physics, where she immediately stood out for both her school work and research. She took a summer job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she decided once and for all that she really did want to become a physicist. After getting her degree in 1990, Jin went to the University of Chicago in Illinois to study for her PhD. While she was there, she met another physicist, John Bohn, whom she married, and sometimes collaborated with on experiments.
Famous Physicists
Jin graduated with her PhD in 1995 and decided to go work at JILA in Boulder, Colorado with Eric Cornell, who is famous for winning a Nobel Prize in 2001. To work with Cornell, Jin changed the type of physics she studied, going from solid state physics—a type of physics that studies solid matter and is the basis for creating new kinds of materials—to a branch of physics called atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics, which involves studying the behavior of atoms at extremely cold temperatures. Ultracold atoms have the potential to be used in superpowerful, superfast computers called quantum computers; quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that normal computers can’t. While she had to learn new skills at her new job, Jin quickly impressed Cornell and other physicists in the AMO community. In 1995, Cornell and a University of Colorado professor Carl E. Wieman had just observed something that has been called a fifth state of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). They did this by creating a gas of particles called bosons and cooling it so much that all of the bosons slowed down so much they almost stopped moving, and then melded together to act like one bigger particle. Once she joined Cornell at JILA, Jin led the first studies of this new type of matter.
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