Lasers

Tarun Lalli and Dathusan Partheepan, U6th Students

As part of our Gold CREST project, we spent around two weeks at the University of Birmingham under the guidance of Dr Vincent Boyer and PhD student Eleanor Fradgley, participating in the practical element required as part of the project. During our time there, we learnt about the quantum nature of light, quantum and classical noise of laser light and how noise level of laser light can be reduced by squeezing light.

We started the placement by using our knowledge of A level Physics to gain a better understanding of the concept of quantum, classical noise and squeezing light. Already knowing that light is made up of photons made this easier to understand.

We then participated in the PhD student’s research into this to gain a better understanding of this concept and I believe experiencing what was going on made it easier to understand the concept of noise power. We were then, with assistance, able to carry out our own practical and look at how classical/quantum noise is

affected by altering the signal’s power and produce a set of results.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed our placement at the university, and we felt privileged to be given this spectacular opportunity to take a step up from A level and delve more into the world of Physics. Our favourite part of the placement was being able to experience equipment that we have never come across before, such as the optical equipment that we used in our practical and in collecting results from the experiment. We also enjoyed learning some programming in Python which we were able to use to plot the results of our experiment.