GPK: Cooper pairs are nice, but split ones are even nicer! Why it is important to ‘’unpair’’ a Cooper pair
Tuesday, 15th of May, 16.00
(16.00 Coffee & Cake in the foyer, 16.30 talk & discussion)
Lecture Hall III
An elegant concept for the creation of entangled electrons in a solid-state device is to split Cooper pairs by coupling a superconductor to two parallel quantum dots in a Y-junction geometry. Cooper pair splitting (CPS) was investigated in recent years in devices based on semiconducting nanowires and carbon nanotubes. I will first review these experiments and demonstrate that high splitting efficiencies > 90% can be achieved.
A high CPS efficiency is a prerequisite for Bell state measurements, a clear way of proving that Cooper pairs can be extracted coherently, leading to spatially separated entangled electron pairs. Christian Schönenberger from Baselwill present a journey in research that started around 12 years ago in his lab. It shows how scientific research evolves, where one often takes detours and where one constantly must reflect the finding in the lab based on either physical intuition (simple minded models) or, if available, good theory.
Tuesday, 9th of May, 16.00
The changing paradigms in physics reflect how society thinks about and approaches nature. Accordingly, although natural science is typically objective and reproducible, it’s not neutral at all, but reflects the questions of the scientists as part of their society. Gudrun Wolfschmidt will exemplify this in the field of astrophysics: