Previous Michelson Postdoctoral Prize Lectureships

Researchers are taking advantage of the silicon industry's development of fabrication tools and techniques to construct devices with dimensions comparable or smaller than fundamental physical length scales, such as the Fermi wavevector, quantum-phase coherence lengths, or the thermal phonon wavelength in a dielectric suspended beam. Here I will review some of the basic fabrication techniques by using examples of some important devices that researchers have made. An application of particular interest is the possibility to fabricate a mechanical oscillator which can be prepared in its quantum mechanical ground state. Once this is realized, one has a quantum measurement playground; quantum non-demolition, back-action experiments, squeezed states, etc..