Polymerization of Acetylene in Liquid Crystal Media

The synthesis of polyacetylene in a new class of solvents - liquid crystals - will be reported. The effect of the solvent molecules orientation in the polymer's structure and its properties will be discussed.     

Excited Brownian motions as limits of excited random walks

We obtain the convergence in law of a sequence of excited (also called cookies) random walks toward an excited Brownian motion. This last process is a continuous semi-martingale whose drift is a function, say ??, of its local time. It was introduced by Norris, Rogers and Williams as a simplified version of Brownian polymers, and then recently further studied by the authors. To get our results we need to renormalize together the sequence of cookies, the time and the space in a convenient way. The proof follows a general approach already taken by Tóth and his coauthors in multiple occasions, which goes through Ray-Knight type results. Namely we first prove, when ?? is bounded and Lipschitz, that the convergence holds at the level of the local time processes. This is done via a careful study of the transition kernel of an auxiliary Markov chain which describes the local time at a given level. Then we prove a tightness result and deduce the convergence at the level of the full processes.     

Heavy-Ion Collisions: Experimental Highlights

Lattice QCD predicts a phase transition between hadronic matter and a system of deconfined quarks and gluons (the Quark Gluon Plasma) at high energy densities. Our current understanding of this new state of matter will be discussed with two key results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).     

Direct measurement of the Wigner function of a one-photon Fock state in a cavity

We have measured the complete Wigner function W of the vacuum and of a single-photon state for a field stored in a high-Q cavity. This experiment implements the direct Lutterbach and Davidovich method [L. G. Lutterbach and L. Davidovich, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 2547 (1997)]] and is based on the dispersive interaction of a single circular Rydberg atom with the cavity field. The nonclassical nature of the single-photon field is exhibited by a region of negative W values. Extensions to other nonclassical cavity field states are discussed.     

Nondestructive Rydberg atom counting with mesoscopic fields in a cavity

We present an efficient, state-selective, nondemolition atom-counting procedure based on the dispersive interaction of a sample of circular Rydberg atoms with a mesoscopic field contained in a high-quality superconducting cavity. The state-dependent atomic index of refraction, proportional to the atom number, shifts the classical field phase. A homodyne procedure translates the information from the phase to the intensity. The final field intensity is readout by a mesoscopic atomic sample. This method opens promising routes for quantum information processing and nonclassical state generation with Rydberg atoms.     

Modal dispersion phase-matched frequency doubling in composite planar waveguide using ion-exchanged glass and optically nonlinear poled polymer

We report on the fabrication and characterization of composite planar waveguides for frequency doubling. Modal dispersion phase matching is obtained for TM₀ fundamental and (TM₁, TM₂) harmonic wavelength. The experimental conversion efficiency was η=0.45% with an SH wavelength of 0.516 μm for TM₀^ω–TM₂^2ω mode conversion. The phase-matching condition can be fulfilled by adjusting the diffusion time of ion-exchange and the thickness of the polymer layer.