Dance Your Ph.D.: The 2013 winners, and one that was not chosen

The Dance Your Dissertation competition announced its new winners. John Bohannon, who created and oversees the event, gives details at the Science Now web site. The grand winner is:

Cedric Tan, a biologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who finished his Ph.D. there last year with a thesis titled “Sperm competition between brothers and female choice.” His dance interpretation of that research illustrates the chicken mating process using a range of styles, from swing and water ballet—yes, in actual water—to modern jazz and what can only be described as cockfighting.

There were also winners in several categories (chemistry, physics, and social sciences — the “sperm competition” video won the biology category). The scientists and other dancers and technicians who created the videos put in tremendous amounts of care and time.

I was again one of the judges. I’d like to specially (if unofficially) commend one of the physics videos that was not chosen for a prize. Here is Chiara Vitelli‘s “Searching for Schroedinger’s cat: generation and manipulation of multiphoton quantum states“. Before watching it, you might want to read Vitelli’s introduction to the dance, which I have reproduced here, below the video.

Chiara and Silvia perform twin photons with a very special quantum-mechanical property, having no classical analogue. They are “entangled”, in the sense that the properties of Chiara can be inferred probing Silvia, and vice-versa. Specifically, they render their oppositely correlated polarizations by dancing in a specular fashion.

One of the twin photon, Chiara, is amplified by a special crystal generating a bunch of clones. Is the microscopic world (Silvia) still entangled with the macroscopic world represented by the new family of Chiara’s clones? The question is a critical one, since this micro-macro entanglement is the very essence of a Schroedinger’s cat, where the quantum state of an atom (the microscopic world), once probed, rules the fate of the cat (the macroscopic world). This is the celebrated paradox named after Schroedinger.

Unfortunately, quantum cloning is not as simple and smooth as xeroxing. Among several Chiaras, some Silvia-like photons always come out from the amplification. Requiring some arbitrary criterion to identify the correct multi-photon state. A clever filter does the job, asking at least two specific performances to the cloned family in order to test the micro-macro entanglement. Oscillation-based and rotation-based movements represent two possible ways of measuring polarization. After each performance the filter counts the copies moving like Chiara and those moving like Silvia. When sufficiently unbalanced, i.e. more Chiaras than Silvias, he approves the state, else he rejects it.

The two successful measurements achieved by the filter are suggestive of the entangled nature between the microscopic (Silvia) and the macroscopic state (cloned Chiaras).

As any groundbreaking scientific discovery, several years later a lively debate still stands…

References:

1. Francesco De Martini, Fabio Sciarrino and Chiara Vitelli, ”Entanglement Test on a Microscopic-Macroscopic System” Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 253601 (2008). link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.253601

2. Chiara Vitelli, Nicolò Spagnolo, Lorenzo Toffoli, Fabio Sciarrino, and Francesco De Martini, ”Quantum-to-classical transition via fuzzy measurements on high-gain spontaneous parametric down-conversion” Phys. Rev. A 81, 032123 (2010)link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.032123

3. Chiara Vitelli, Nicolò Spagnolo, Lorenzo Toffoli, Fabio Sciarrino, and Francesco De Martini, “Enhanced Resolution of Lossy Interferometry by Coherent Amplification of Single Photons” Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 113602 (2010)link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.113602

BONUS: Several years ago, one of the Dance Your Dissertation competition winners, Miriam Sach, performed as part of the Improbable Research session at the AAAS Annual Meeting (which that year was held in San Diego). Perhaps, perhaps one of the new winners will perform at the the Improbable Research session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting, in Chicago, on Saturday night, February 15, 2012.