Speaker's Brief Introduction：Markus Arndt is a Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and head of the Quantum Nanophysics Group. After his Ph.D. with Antoine Weis and Theodor W. Hänsch at MPQ Garching and LMU Munich he spent two years with Jean Dalibard at the ENS Paris where he worked on ultracold atoms, atom optics, and atom interferometry. In 1997 he joined Anton Zeilinger as a postdoc in Innsbruck to jointly start the field of macromolecule interferometry. He moved to Vienna in 1999 where he has worked ever since. His current interests cover matter-wave interferometry, molecular quantum optics, quantum-enhanced molecule metrology, molecular sources, detectors, and cooling methods as well as the interface between quantum physics and biology.
Abstract: Quantum mechanics is celebrating a sequence of centenaries, this year commemorating Erwin Schrödinger’s wave hypothesis. Confirmed by countless experiments, quantum theory has since become the foundation of a vast range of technologies. Yet, we still struggle to grasp the meaning of the quantum wave function, the interpretation of its formalism and its implications for the nature of reality. This talk will illustrate our approach to universal matter-wave interferometry
and how far it can reach to our daily world.
I will discuss the experimental conditions, realizations and applications of experiments across diverse material classes and ever-increasing mass scales: from C60 molecules to vitamins and polypeptides, molecular clusters, macromolecules and metal nanoparticles with thousands of atoms in a single delocalized body. The tools developed in the context of our molecular quantum optics are applied in quantum biophysics, mass spectrometry and molecular analysis.