Department of Physics

Igor Pikovski, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, has been selected to receive the Stevens Presidential Fellowship award.

The Stevens Presidential Fellowship recognizes a faculty member’s achievements in research and their potential for future contributions and impact.

Pikovski joined Stevens in 2018. His research involves gravitational phenomena in quantum theory, quantum optics and information theory, and quantum opto-mechanics. Since joining Stevens, he has received research awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and the Department of Energy totaling more than $1.5 million, including the prestigious NSF CAREER Award.

Previously, Pikovski served for three years as an ITAMP Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, an NSF-funded institute hosted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Branco Weiss Society in Science fellowship, administered by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. With the freedom to conduct research on any topic at any institution anywhere in the world through this five-year grant, Pikovski chose to remain at Harvard, before later transferring the fellowship to Stevens.

Pikovski is the author or co-author of more than 30 papers published in high-impact journals. including Nature Physics, Nature Communications and the American Physical Society’s Physical Review.

Adam Overvig, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, has been named a Finalist in the 2023 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists. Sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, the awards program honors outstanding contributions by postdoctoral researchers in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area in the categories of life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and chemical sciences.

One of only six finalists, Overvig has been awarded $10,000 in unrestricted funds for inventing new methods for designing and employing thin materials called metasurfaces to control and manipulate light and thermal radiation with high accuracy and efficiency.

His inventions control multiple properties of physical light simultaneously and, when heated, the metasurfaces are capable of simultaneously creating and controlling light without the need for an external laser.

Overvig’s work holds the potential for advancing atomic, molecular and optical physics as a whole and contributing to a wide range of technologies, including quantum computing, bio-imaging, lasers and augmented reality.

Nominations for this prestigious award are made by invited research, academic and government institutions in the New York Tri-State region and are evaluated by a jury of distinguished scientists and engineers. Overvig and his fellow awardees were recognized at a ceremony held in New York City on September 19, 2023.

Igor Pikovski, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, recently received a $514,230 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project, “Towards Low-Energy Tests of Quantum Gravity with AMO Systems.” The five-year project seeks to address conceptual and practical challenges of resolving quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of general relativity to enable experimental searches for quantum gravity at low energies.

Quantum theory describes the smallest building blocks of nature and predicts puzzling phenomena that have been confirmed to enormous precision on atomic scales. General relativity, on the other hand, describes gravity as curved space and time, governing the dynamics of planets, galaxies and the universe.

While both theories have withstood the test of time, they are seemingly at odds with each other, and it remains a puzzle how to combine them into a single framework.

A major challenge to developing a complete theory of quantum gravity is the scant experimental evidence that could guide theoretical developments as both theories are relevant at seemingly distant scales. Pikovski seeks to tackle this problem from a new perspective by using advanced quantum technologies to test the interplay of quantum theory and gravity.

Pikovski will design new detection methods based on quantum optical systems and quantum information concepts that can enable experiments to probe the gravity-quantum interface. The project will focus on tests of fundamental principles that can indirectly reveal signatures of quantization of gravity and on tests of speculative models that show signatures at low energies that can be probed in near-future experiments.

Pikovski’s goal is to show how the gravity-quantum interface can be tested in laboratory experiments with new quantum technologies and a quantum information approach. The project will significantly advance this young and promising research field by providing realistic paths for new tabletop and space-based experiments, by overcoming current technical and conceptual drawbacks, and by supporting quantum technology development for basic science.

The research of Xiaofeng Qian, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics, and Misagh Izadi ’23, a research assistant with the Stevens Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, has been featured on the website of Physics World, the monthly publication of the U.K.-based professional membership society Institute of Physics. Izadi received his master’s degree in physics from Stevens in May 2023.

Titled “Bridging Coherence Optics and Classical Mechanics: A Generic Light Polarization-Entanglement Complementary Relation,” Qian and Izadi’s research establishes the first quantitative relationship between mechanics (the study of the motion of physical bodies) and optics (the study of light). Their research was published in the August 17 online issue of the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Research.

The work proves for the first time that a light wave’s degree of non-quantum entanglement (how systems remain connected despite their distance or any barriers) exists in a direct and complementary relationship with its degree of polarization (the direction of vibration of light waves). As one rises, the other falls, enabling the level of entanglement to be inferred directly from the level of polarization, and vice versa. This means that hard-to-measure optical properties such as amplitudes, phases and correlations can be deduced by measuring light intensity.

The discovery leverages two seemingly unrelated theories by 17th-century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens: that light is a wave (in contrast to Isaac Newton’s theory that light behaves like particles) and a mechanical theorem published in a 1673 book on pendulums, that explains how the energy required to rotate an object varies depending on the object’s mass and the axis around which it turns.

Although still theoretical, Qian and Izadi’s breakthrough fundamentally connects light wave features with mechanical mass concepts for the first time and deepens the fundamental understanding of both optics and mechanics. It provides a visual mechanical interpretation of the intriguingly abstract concept of entanglement, which in turn shows exciting promise for impact in quantum information, computation and simulation.

Qian and Izadi’s research paves the way for a fresh view of wave optics and mechanics. Its potential impact reaches across and beyond these diverse disciplines, offering new avenues for research, exploration and education in both classical and quantum physics.