QuantumControl

Michèle Heurs

Prof. Dr. Michèle Heurs

Callinstraße 36
Room 127
30167 Hannover

michele.heurs@aei.uni-hannover.de
+49 511 762 17037

In July 2010 Michèle took up a Junior Professorship at the Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research (QUEST) at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. Before that she was a Research Fellow in the group of Prof. E. H. Huntington, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (Canberra, Australia). During this time her research was based in the following areas: Modern quantum feedback control of quantum optical systems, continuous variable quantum computing, generation of a comb of squeezed light, measurement induced entanglement, homodyne locking and detection.

Since Dec. 2016 she is a professor of experimental physics at Leibniz Universität Hannover. The position carries the denomination “Non-classical laser interferometry”, where applications are of course aimed at future interferometric gravitational wave detectors, but also at precision metrology in quantum optics.

Michèle Heurs is (co-)author of more than 260 publications:

Michèle Heurs’ outreach activities (selection):

“I work in the field of quantum optics, in particular in non-classical laser interferometry, quantum metrology, and quantum opto-mechanics.

In my group we work on making (laser) light that is better than nature would like you to be able to have. It’s called „squeezed light“, and we use it for precision measurements. We exploit the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to reduce the noise in the measurement quantity we’re interested in, at the cost of increasing the noise in another (uninteresting one). This allows us to increase the precision of measurements to below the quantum level.

Examples of such sensitive measurements are gravitational wave detection, where quantum noise already limits the measurement sensitivity over much of the detection band, but also applications in ultra-high precision spectroscopy, and quantum information, amongst others.”

Michèles current research interests lie in the following areas:

  • Quantum noise reduction schemes for interferometric gravitational wave detectors (e.g. coherent quantum noise cancellation; recycling techniques with micro-optomechanical oscillators)
  • Non-classical light sources (high-frequency sub-threshold optical parametric oscillators)
  • Laser physics (including laser stabilization, novel locking schemes, and non-linear optics)
  • Precision metrology (obviously interferometric gravitational wave detection, but also stable high finesse optical resonators)
  • High-frequency large bandwidth low-noise photodetection (single and homodyne)
  • Modeling of micro-optomechanical oscillators / membranes
  • Classical, modern, and coherent control

Michèle is a long-term member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) (since around 2003, with a break during her PostDoc in Australia 2007 — 2010), and has been a Council Member of the LSC since 2015. She is currently Dean of the QUEST Leibniz Research School (a faculty-equivalent structure spanning different faculties of Leibniz Universität Hannover), as well as acting co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “QuantumFrontiers”. In the two Clusters of Excellence “QuantumFrontiers” and “PhoenixD” she is a Principle Investigator, and Leader of the Topical Group “Backaction-evading techniques” in “QuantumFrontiers”.