My lab runs on simulation software. COMSOL for finite element modeling. Lumerical and Tidy3D for photonic FDTD. Sonnet and sometimes Palace for microwave circuits. We design quantum devices — mechanical resonators, superconducting circuits, photonic waveguides — and before anything gets fabricated, it gets simulated. "An hour of COMSOL can save a
Research labs are exciting environments where we learn, discover and invent new things. But they can be weird as well. You can have someone who fabricates superconducting qubits or photonic circuits and builds systems that operate at the limits allowed by the laws of physics, but who has never written
Quantum Sensing
A few nights ago I was on a panel on Quantum Sensing for Defense. Preparing for this panel crystallized some ideas for me, which I think I should write down somewhere. So here it is! When we talk about "quantum sensing," we often imagine a single, exquisite, hyper-sensitive
Lecture Notes
Spending a few days at Les Houches workshop on TFLN photonics 😄 Here are my lecture notes. These are currently a very rough draft, though fairly respectable looking... I used Gemini 2.5 pretty heavily to help prepare these notes. For example, I'd write up some notes on paper,
![Fidelity, Fisher Information, QCRB and All that [pt. 1]](/content/images/size/w600/2025/05/IMG_3285.jpeg)
Quantum Sensing
What about those time-energy and number-phase uncertainty relations? The way the time-energy uncertainty was often explained to me when I first learned quantum mechanics felt pretty hand-wavy ... The QCRB solves this and puts these uncertainty relations on a proper footing.
Basic Physics
If nature only cared about minimizing energy, all the gas molecules around us would collapse to the floor and we would suffocate. If nature only maximized entropy, all the gas would expand and disperse throughout the universe, and we would suffocate.
Lecture Notes
I am going to finally start putting my lecture notes online 😄 For now, I'm beginning with the course notes for AP203/228, which is a two-quarter series: * First quarter: Primarily focused on quantum optics and atomic physics (taught collaboratively with Ben Lev, Monika Schleier-Smith, and Jon Simon) * Second
News
A conversation with Wentao.