Previous Colloquia

Bio: I have lived my entire life in Colorado, love teaching physics, and studying how people learn physics. I have taught a range of courses over 15 years from introductory physics to graduate level science education research seminar.

My research focuses on formative assessment and curriculum design. I developed the widely used CLASS, which measures students’ perceptions of physics and how to learn physics; have done extensive work on problem solving evaluation; developed the interface design guidelines for the PhET Interactive Simulations; and most recently developed the PTaP (Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession) instrument. I have also designed and developed several curricula including the Explore Sound project – K-14 materials for acoustics.

Over the years I have also juggled a few other roles, including co-Director of the PhET Interactive Simulations Project, Director of Research for the Science Education Initiative at CU, Boulder, Research Consultant with the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at UBC, Education Coordinator for the Acoustical Society of America , and Director of Science Teacher Education Programs at the University of Northern Colorado. Currently I am working with several national societies to build a campaign aimed at recruiting secondary math and science teachers.

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Quantum science with neutral atoms has seen great advances in the past two decades. Many of these advances follow from the development of new techniques for cooling, trapping, and controlling atomic samples. As one example, the technique of optical tweezer trapping of neutral atom arrays has been a powerful tool for quantum simulation and quantum information, because it enables control and detection of individual atoms with switchable interactions. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work at JILA where we have explored a new direction for the optical tweezer platform: metrology. I will report our recent progress towards combining scalability and quantum coherence in a tweezer-based optical atomic clock platform, and our efforts towards using quantum information concepts and many-body dynamics to create entangled states that enhance metrological performance. Much of this technology is based in the use of tweezer-trapping of a new family of atoms, alkaline-earth atoms — I will discuss the broader outlook of this direction and new pursuits on the horizon.
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Tweezing a New Kind of Atomic Clock

Bio: Dr. Adam Kaufman is an associate JILA fellow and assistant professor adjoint at CU Boulder. He did his PhD at JILA, studying few-body quantum mechanics of atoms in optical tweezers. Afterwards, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, he investigated the dynamics of entanglement in thermalizing many-body systems and other Bose-Hubbard phenomena. In 2017, he moved back to JILA where he has continued working in the field of quantum science with neutral atoms. He is a winner of the prestigious APS DAMOP thesis prize in 2016, and he pioneered the research on atomic clocks based on optical tweezers.

Abstract: Much has been learned in the past few decades about how to teach undergraduate STEM courses in a way that generates positive and equitable student outcomes. At the same time, many instructional change efforts that aim to support individual instructors in incorporating equitable, student-centered classroom practices have fallen short of achieving widespread change. Instructional change teams are a promising mechanism for achieving sustained improvements to undergraduate STEM courses and are becoming more prevalent in higher education change efforts that focus on systems rather than individuals. Yet team-based change efforts are also much more complex and can fall apart without appropriate support and guidance. For the past five years, my collaborators and I have been pursuing research that aims to reveal how change leaders can provide that support to teams. We have used grounded theory to create a model that highlights key aspects of how instructional change teams work together to achieve various kinds of success. The model includes five team inputs, five team processes, three emergent states (how teams think and feel about their work), and four team outcomes. In this talk, I will describe how we developed this model using interviews with project leaders and team members from across the U.S., as well as literature about teams in other contexts. I will then provide examples of how lessons from the model can be applied in practice by drawing on my own change efforts at Texas State University. Specifically, I will illustrate how this model informed the design of a 5-year, $2.5 million instructional change effort that I am currently co-leading in our college of science and engineering. I will also discuss how the model has helped me to implement a small-scale curriculum development project within my own department. Finally, I will discuss how the initial research project has evolved into a new grant-funded project, and what we hope to accomplish from a practical and research perspective.

Bio: Dr. Alice Olmstead (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Physics and the Co-director of the Physics Learning Assistant Program at Texas State University. She is also a co-PI and programmatic co-lead on the $2.5 million, 5-year NSF-IUSE-HSI award “Creating Faculty-Student Communities for Culturally Relevant Institutional Change” at her home institution. Her primary research expertise is on strategies that can help STEM faculty to improve their instruction and lead to long-term change. She has also recently been pursuing research related her own teaching, specifically focusing on how to support students’ reasoning about connections between physics/STEM, ethics, and society. She received her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Maryland in 2016 and held a postdoctoral research appointment at the Center for Research on Instructional Change in Postsecondary Education (CRICPE) at Western Michigan University from 2016-2018. She has been at Texas State since 2018.

Abstract: Electron spin qubits in Si are promising candidates as building blocks toward future scalable quantum computers. Tremendous progress has been made in the past decade in demonstrating the exceptional coherence properties of spins confined in quantum dots and donors. However, studies of high-fidelity manipulation of spin qubits have encountered numerous problems as well: for donors, the small Bohr radius makes donor electrons hard to locate and control; for quantum dots, especially ones in Si/SiGe heterostructures, small valley splitting makes spin detection based on spin blockade difficult to realize. In this talk I discuss our recent work on spin manipulation and decoherence in Si quantum dots. I will first show that the complex valley-orbit coupling in a Si quantum dot can be significantly impacted by the atomistic scale features of an interface. The different valley mixing angles across a double dot would remove all valley selection rules in electron tunneling, and cause significant modification to the two-electron exchange coupling. On the decoherence front, I will discuss our recent study of spin relaxation in a Si quantum dot under the influence of a micromagnet that allows electrical control of single spins in Si. We show that the field gradient generated by a micromagnet amounts to an artificial spin-orbit interaction. However, unlike intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, which causes only spin relaxation, a micromagnet would cause both spin relaxation and pure dephasing, and generate a longitudinal effective field that could potentially be used for spin manipulation.
We thank support by US ARO.

Short Bio: Xuedong Hu is a physics professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. He received his PhD degree in condensed matter theory from University of Michigan in 1996, supervised by Franco Nori. He was introduced to the field of solid state quantum information processing in 1998 as a postdoc in Sankar Das Sarma’s group at the University of Maryland. His recent research focus is on spin qubits in silicon.

Abstract: My path through physics is non-traditional in many ways, and it serves as an example of how the physics discipline can fail Black students even when we are seen as high achieving. In this talk, I will discuss my physics journey, and how I found myself in a career that is focused on pushing the field of physics to become a more equitable space for Black folks. Because my experiences resonate with research findings from studies I have conducted, I will use excerpts from my study participants to demonstrate some common themes of experience for Black physicists. I will wrap up the talk with some ideas about how other members of the physics community can learn to become an agent of change, and what ongoing initiatives are looking to make the field more equitable and just.

Bio: Dr. Simone Hyater-Adams is a physicist, artist, educator, and researcher with a passion for creating more opportunities for Black STEM students. After receiving her B.S. in Physics from Hampton University, she pursued graduate studies at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. In her graduate research, she used her personal experiences from pursuing physics to guide her interdisciplinary research examining the connections between performance art and identity for Black Physicists. This work was awarded the Harry Lustig Award from the American Physical Society’s Four Corners Section. Currently, Simone manages the American Physical Society’s National Mentoring Community. Concurrently she continues to develop her Performing Physics program, an outreach program that incorporates physics with performance art. In addition to this work, Simone also develops and facilitates equity workshops with goals to cultivate more inclusive and equitable STEM learning and working environments.

Quantum computing is based on the manipulation of two-level quantum systems, or qubits. In most approaches to quantum computing, qubits are as much as possible isolated from their environment in order to minimize the loss of qubit phase coherence. The use of nuclear spins as qubits is a well-known realization of this approach. In a radically different approach, quantum computing is also possible for strongly coupled multi-electron spin 1/2 systems, as realized in silicon-based devices. In this talk I will present both a historical overview of how quantum manipulation in silicon has developed, as well as the latest results from both our group at Wisconsin and from around the world. I will discuss our recent demonstration of coherent manipulation of eight different microwave-frequency resonances in a single silicon quantum dot, which starts to glimpse the future prospect of spin qubits being controlled using the types of powerful tools developed for controlling atoms by the AMO community over many decades. I will end with a brief discussion of how silicon fits into the broad quantum science and technology ecosystem, which is growing at an astounding rate. This article in Physics Today discusses closely related material: Quantum computing with semiconductor spins.

Bio: Mark A. Eriksson is the John Bardeen Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a B.S. with honors in physics and mathematics in 1992 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an A.M. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in physics from Harvard University. His Ph.D. thesis demonstrated the first cryogenic scanned-gate measurements of a semiconductor nanostructure. He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1997-1999, where he studied ultra-low-density electron systems. Eriksson joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at UW-Madison in 1999. His research has focused on quantum computing, semiconductor quantum dots, and nanoscience. With collaborators he demonstrated the first quantum dot in silicon/silicon-germanium occupied by an individual electron and performed the first experiments to demonstrate the quantum dot hybrid qubit. Eriksson currently leads a multi-university team focused on the development of spin qubits in gate-defined silicon quantum dots. A goal of this work is to enable quantum computers, which manipulate information coherently, to be built using many of the materials and fabrication methods that are the foundation of modern, classical integrated circuits. Eriksson was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015.

Abstract: Because of hydrogen’s simplicity, its energy levels are well-described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). This had made precision spectroscopy of hydrogen a favorite testbed for bound-stated QED. In addition, assuming the QED calculations are correct, one can use hydrogen spectroscopy to determine the Rydberg constant and the proton-charge radius. Any discrepancy of these constants determined in different systems can indicate new physics. In 2010, such a discrepancy was found [Pohl, R. et al. Nature 466, 213 (2010)] when the proton charge radius in muonic hydrogen was found to be about 5-sigma away from the value found through normal hydrogen spectroscopy (termed the proton-radius puzzle). In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing experiments at Colorado State University to produce additional spectroscopic hydrogen data to address this puzzle. Specifically, we have been measuring the 2S-8D transition in a cryogenic beam of hydrogen, which we hope will provide a new determination of the proton charge radius soon. In addition, I will discuss our efforts at laser slowing our atomic hydrogen beam, which could allow for more precise spectroscopy in the future.

Bio: Dylan Yost grew up in Colorado and obtained his BS in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines in 2005. While at Mines, he performed undergraduate research with Prof. Durfee and Prof. Ohno. He received his PhD on work with vacuum-ultraviolet frequency combs from the University of Colorado in 2011. In 2012, he was a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and worked on precision hydrogen spectroscopy. He is currently an associate professor at Colorado State University. He has received an NSF CAREER award and the NIST Precision Measurement Grant for his hydrogen spectroscopy experiments.

Abstract: Heme proteins contain an iron-porphyrin group, which plays a central role in oxygen transport, electron transfer, and catalysis in a wide range of organisms. Their unique redox- and oxygen-sensitive optical absorption spectra form the basis for technologies like pulse-oximetry devices and provided critical clues that led to the discovery of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. This talk will focus on transient (picosecond and femtosecond timescale) optically-excited states of heme proteins, their spectral signatures, and use for nonlinear optical imaging of blood oxygenation, mitochondria, and potential for detection of mitochondrial disease. We will also discuss modeling heme transient absorption responses with a time-correlator approach and active suppression of laser intensity noise with adaptive digital signal processing.

Bio: Jesse Wilson is a Boettcher Young Investigator, Rhoden Professor, and Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Colorado State University. Prior to joining CSU’s faculty, Jesse trained as a postdoc in Warren Warren’s lab at Duke University, working on in-vivo transient absorption microscopy of melanoma. He earned his PhD in Randy Bartels’ lab at Colorado State University, developing techniques in ultrafast pulse shaping and impulsive Raman spectroscopy.

Event flyer

When light interacts with complex materials, it can give rise to a variety of interesting phenomena. In this talk, I will first give a short explanation of how light interacts with materials. This will include a discussion of plasmon polaritons, a type of quasiparticle that arises from the strong interaction of a photon with the electrons in a material. Plasmon polaritons can be used for a variety of applications including focusing and imaging below the diffraction limit of light, subdiffraction waveguiding, gas sensing, and many more. I will discuss our work on exciting and coupling plasmon polaritons in topological insulator thin films and layered structures. Topological insulators have two-dimensional surface states that house massless electrons. The plasmon polaritons in these materials therefore show unusual properties. I will discuss the dispersion of these modes and show record high mode indices and extremely long polariton lifetimes. I will close by discussing our work on semiconductor hyperbolic metamaterials. These materials act optically metallic in one direction and transparent in the other direction. I will show our work demonstrating negative refraction (bending light backward) in these materials as well as their ability to house their own complex plasmon polariton modes.
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Bio: Prof. Stephanie Law received her B.S. in Physics from Iowa State University and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She then held a postdoctoral position in the Electrical Engineering department at UIUC before moving to the University of Delaware as the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering. She is now an Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She is also the co-director of the UD Materials Growth Facility and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology. Prof. Law has won the North American Molecular Beam Epitaxy Young Investigator award, the Department of Energy Early Career award, the AVS Peter Mark Memorial Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Neutron beta decay is an archetype for all semi-leptonic charged-current weak processes. A precise value for the neutron lifetime is required for consistency tests of the Standard Model and is needed to predict the primordial 4He abundance from the theory of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Other parameters from neutron beta decay, in combination with the neutron lifetime, can be used to extract the Vud parameter in the quark mixing matrix of the Standard Model, providing a useful test of new physics. These are all quantities that have been in flux in recent years, with the advent of high precision experiments. The status of the field as well as recent and upcoming measurements will be presented.
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A year ago, the Mines physics department led a student team to compete in Morocco in the inaugural Solar Decathlon Africa. The engineering and science that lead to the victory in this project will be discussed, along with the tale of the international adventure that involved two physics departments and three universities. While this may be the only time that a basic science department formed the two lead institutions, it highlights the importance and future role of science in the broader energy and building science.
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Bio: Prof. Ohno graduated from the University of Maryland in experimental surface science in 1993, under the direction of Prof. Ellen Williams, who served as director of ARPA-E. His work at the University of Minnesota strengthened his interest in materials science before coming to Mines in 1992. As the oldest member of the department, he has seen the growth of the department beyond its original research focus at that time, which included photovoltaics. Leading that program led to service as the director of the campus Energy Minor, and ultimately support for student organizations involved in energy topics.

Understanding how the brain’s complex neural networks perform critical functions and govern behavior, cognition and intuition is a key goal of neuroscience and can lead to improved treatment for various neurological disorders. The development of new tools for studying the brain is critical in this effort. Light Microscopy has greatly expanded the capabilities for minimally invasive cellular-level biological studies and in combination with genetically encoded fluorescent indicators allows unprecedented real-time imaging of action potentials in individual neurons in a network. In this talk, I will discuss recent work in my lab on the development of miniature fiber-coupled microscopes for 3-D imaging using adaptive optics and their applications for studies in freely moving and behaving animals. Additionally, I will discuss how adaptive optics for control of light patterning combined with optogenetics makes it possible to modulate neuronal activity allowing new studies of how neural circuits govern behavior.
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Bio: Dr. Gibson is an associate professor in the department of Bioengineering at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus with a joint appointment in the Neuroscience program. She earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a specialization in nonlinear optics. She was subsequently a National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences postdoctoral fellow in biophysics, studying protein dynamics with nonlinear optical spectroscopy. Since becoming a faculty member, she has focused on development of optical technologies for clinical applications and biomedical research.

We describe a compact and inexpensive computational microscope that encodes 3D information into a single 2D sensor measurement, then exploits sparsity to reconstruct the volume with good resolution across a large volume. Our system uses simple hardware and scalable software for easy reproducibility and adoption. The inverse algorithm is based on large-scale nonlinear optimization with self-calibration of aberrations and we discuss computational optical design approaches for optimizing the system’s performance. We demonstrate applications in whole organism bioimaging and neural activity tracking in vivo.
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When the dimensionality of an electron system is reduced from three dimensions to two dimensions, new behavior emerges. This has been demonstrated in gallium arsenide quantum Hall systems since the 1980’s, and more recently in van der Waals (vdW) materials, such as graphene. This talk will discuss the behavior of electrons in reduced dimensions with a focus on their spin properties. We highlight our recent study of vdW materials with intrinsic magnetic order. These materials are at the forefront of condensed matter physics research. We use a materials informatics (machine learning applied to materials research) approach to study the magnetic properties and chemical stability of vdW materials. Crystal structures based on monolayer Cr2Ge2Te6, of the form A2B2X6, are studied using density functional theory (DFT) calculations and machine learning methods. Magnetic properties, such as the magnetic moment are determined. The formation energies are also calculated and used to estimate the chemical stability. We show that machine learning methods, combined with DFT, can provide a computationally efficient means to predict properties of two-dimensional (2D) magnetic materials. In addition, data analytics provides novel insights into the microscopic origins of magnetic ordering in two dimensions. Analysis of DFT data highlights that the X site strongly affects the magnetic coupling between neighboring A sites – driving magnetic ordering. This novel approach to materials research paves the way for the rapid discovery of magnetic 2D materials that are chemically stable.Trevor David Rhone,1,3 Wei Chen,1 Shaan Desai,1 Steven B. Torrisi1, Daniel T. Larson1, Amir Yacoby,1 and Efthimios Kaxiras1, 2
1. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
3. Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York

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Silicon is an attractive materials platform for developing large-scale quantum computers because of its compatibility with classical silicon electronics and its potential for scalability. This talk will discuss qubits made from quantum dots with multiple electrons in silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructures. These qubits can be manipulated on nanosecond time scales, and their coherence can be extended greatly by appropriate manipulation protocols. They can be tuned so that additional quantum resonances appear that can be driven coherently, which we show is consistent with effects arising form strong electron-electron interactions. Thus, these multi-electron qubits are interesting both as building blocks for quantum computers and as testbeds for investigating strongly interacting electrons.
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Many lab courses include a final project that spans multiple weeks. Such projects serve several purposes, including nurturing students’ sense of project ownership. Project ownership refers in part to students’ control over and responsibility for an experiment. Research in science education suggests that ownership, motivation, and persistence are interrelated, and that feelings of ownership can fluctuate in time. Building on prior work at a single institution, we have conducted a multi-site study of students’ sense of ownership of multi-week final projects in upper-level physics lab courses. Using survey and interview data, we propose a model that describes ownership as a relationship between student and project characterized by particular student-project and interpersonal interactions during three temporal phases: choice of topic, execution of methods, and creation of deliverables. In our presentation, we will describe implications for the design and implementation of final projects whose goals include fostering a sense of project ownership among students.

Bio: Dr. Dimitri Dounas-Frazer is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education at Western Washington University. He has interdisciplinary expertise in experimental atomic physics and education research. He primarily studies three aspects of physics laboratory coursework: students’ use of model-based reasoning in experimental physics contexts, instructors’ beliefs and practices regarding teaching and learning laboratory skills, and classroom factors that cultivate student ownership of research projects. Additionally, Dr. Dounas-Frazer is an active member of local and national physics diversity initiatives. He is a Mines alum (classes of ’06 and ’07). He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of California Berkeley, where he performed high-precision measurements of weak nuclear effects in atomic systems. His postdoctoral experience includes teacher preparation at the California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo and education research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Bio: Ira Ché Lassen is an undergraduate student at Western Washington University (WWU) and Fairhaven College. He expects to complete a BS in Physics and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies by June 2022. Lassen’s interests include acoustics, rhetoric, and physics education research (PER), and he has professional experience with 3D sign manufacturing, CNC laser operation, and IT support. In his roles as a Teaching Assistant in the WWU Physics & Astronomy Department and Research Assistant in the WWU PER Group, Lassen is building expertise in both teaching and studying physics laboratory courses.

Photovoltaic (PV) devices based on metal halide perovskite (MHP) absorbers have reached outstanding performance over the past few years, surpassing power conversion efficiency of over 25% for lab cells and with large area devices in excess of 18%. For the solar application stability, the most demanding requirement to assess for PV and remains the outstanding issue for MHP based devices. The problem of stability motivates basic science driven work on MHP based PV at NREL and work by industrial partners. Material and device insight can enable MHP PV stability along with the associated opportunities to further improve efficiency with multijunction while maintaining scalability and manufacturability is critical. This talk will highlight the latest work at NREL to develop understanding of critical roadblocks, aspects of solar cell performance, device architectures, stability and operational dynamic to enable the next generation of photovoltaics.
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Bio: Joseph Berry is a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on halide perovskite solar cells. His PhD for work was on spin transport and physics in semiconductor heterostructures from Penn State University. His efforts at NREL emphasize relating basic interfacial properties to technologically relevant device level behaviors in traditional and novel semiconductor heterostructures including oxides, organics and most recently hybrid semiconducting materials. He leads the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technology Office’s SETO core technology program, “De-risking Halide Perovskite Solar Cells” at NREL. He is a principle investigator on the NREL lead Department of Energy, Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) Energy Frontier Research Center, exploring basic aspect of hybrid materials and is the director of the newly formed U.S. Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites (U.S. MAP) consortium a collaboration between industry academia and the national labs to bring perovskite technologies to market.

Web:
www.nrel.gov/pv/perovskite-solar-cells.html
www.choise-efrc.org
www.usa-perovskites.org

 Hydrodynamic whirlpools have fascinated scientists for centuries, seeking to understand their individual structure, stability, and the ways in which they interact with one another. Who hasn’t marveled at tornadoes or watched as soap bubbles get sucked into the vortex of a bathtub drain? To reduce ideas to their essence, such fluid vortices are often considered in a two-dimensional setting where they amount to current swirling around a singularity. These, in turn, bear a striking resemblance to cross-sections of optical vortices that can be created with lasers, but with the propagation axis now treated as time. The vortex center is a then a dark spot about which the phase of light rotates like a barber shop sign. Such engineered light can therefore be interpreted as a two-dimensional, compressible fluid, and the vortices it harbors exhibit all sorts of odd and potentially useful behavior. For instance, optical vortices can attract, repel, scatter, and even annihilate one another. Even more intriguing, these two-dimensional topological objects have a lot in common with the macroscopic quantum states of Bose-Einstein condensates and fractional quantum Hall systems. Pairs can even be used in Bell tests to demonstrate lack of local realism. This motivates a serious consideration of optical vortices as quantum objects that might be harnessed in emerging quantum information technologies. With these deeper issues in mind, our colloquium lecture is intended to serve as an introduction to optical vortices and their classical few-body dynamics. We tag-team an experimentalist and a theorist to provide a fuller perspective of what makes this form of light so interesting.
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