R C Thompson

R C THOMPSON - CURRICULUM VITAE (Feb 2017)

1. Personal Details

Name: Prof Richard Charles THOMPSON MA DPhil FInstP CPhys FHEA

Date of Birth: 18 June 1955 (Age 61 years)

Department:Quantum Optics and Laser Science Research Group,

Physics Department, Imperial College London

Address:Blackett Laboratory,

Prince Consort Rd,

London SW7 2AZ

Email:

Personal Website:

Research Group Website:www3.imperial.ac.uk/iontrap

Work Telephone:020 7594 3606

Home Telephone:020 8397 3505

Mobile Telephone:07746 964545

Fax:020 7594 7714

Current Appointment:Professor of Experimental Physics

Department of Physics, Imperial College London and

Senior Consul

2. Higher Education

1976 - 1979 Hertford College, Oxford:D Phil in Physics (Feb 1980)

(Topic: Atomic Spectroscopy; Supervisor: Dr D N Stacey)

1973 - 1976 Corpus Christi College, Oxford: BA, Physics, 1st Class (June 1976)

3. Honours and Awards

May 2009Rector’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Imperial College London

Nov 1999Millennium Fellowship Award for an outreach programme in schools

April 1977 Senior Scholarship, Hertford College, Oxford

June 1976 Principal University Scott Prize in Physics and College Book Prize

June 1974 College Book Prize and Open Scholarship, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

4. Appointments

Sep 2012 – Aug 2016Consul, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London

Oct 2008 – Oct 2011 Head of Quantum Optics and Laser Science Research Group

Sep 2003 – Aug 2009Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Physics

Oct 2003 to presentProfessor of Experimental Physics, Imperial College London

Oct 1993 – Sep 2003Reader in Physics, Imperial College London

June 1993 Maitre de Conference, University of Marseille

Oct 1986 – Sep 1993 Lecturer in Physics, Imperial College London

Jan 1985 – Sep 1986 Senior Scientific Officer, National Physical Laboratory

Jan 1983 – Jan 1985 Higher Scientific Officer, National Physical Laboratory

Jan 1982 - Dec 1982 Junior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College,

and Demonstrator, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford

Sep 1980 - Dec 1981Guest Scientist, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany

Oct 1979 - Aug 1980Junior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College,

and Demonstrator, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford

5. Membership of External Bodies

Membership of Professional Bodies:

  • Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Chartered Physicist (2007 to present)
  • Member of the Institute of Physics and Chartered Physicist (1988 to 2006)
  • Fellow of Higher Education Academy (2003 to present)

Membership of External Committees:

  • Assessor for the Queen’s Anniversary Prize
  • CERN SPS Committee (2012 to 2016)
  • Institute of Physics Accreditation Committee (2003 to 2013), Chair (2008 to 2013)
  • Institute of Physics Higher Education Group Treasurer (2008 to 2012)
  • Institute of Physics Membership and Qualifications Board (2010 to 2013)
  • Institute of Physics Professional Services Committee (1991 to 1993)
  • Institute of Physics Quantum Electronics Group Committee (1989 to 1992)
  • Institute of Physics Spectroscopy Group Committee (1988 to 1992)
  • Board of the Atomic Physics Division of European Physical Society (EPS) (1992 to 1995)
  • Treasurer of the Atomic Physics Division of European Physical Society (1995-1998)
  • Board of the Quantum Electronics Division of EPS (1992 to 1995)
  • Board of the European Group for Atomic Spectroscopy (EGAS) (1985 to 1991)

6. Administrative Responsibilities

  • Dean/Consul of the Faculty of Natural Sciences: I was elected by the academic staff in the Faculty to serve as Dean/Consul from September 2011 to August 2016 (including one year as Senior Consul). This involves participation in several high-level committees in the College and serving on numerous appointment and promotion panels as well as student hearings and appeal panels.
  • Management: I served as Head of the Quantum Optics and Laser Science Research Group (consisting of approximately 17 academics and a total of around 100 people including other staff and postgraduate students) for three years from 2008 to 2011.
  • Teaching Administration: I served for 6 years (from 2003 to 2009) as Director of Undergraduate Studies, which involves running 6 undergraduate teaching programmes in a department having a total of over 700 students and about 100 academic staff. I was a member of the Departmental Teaching Committee for several years prior to this and participated in panels for review and development of the undergraduate courses.
  • Quality Assurance: I chaired the Science Studies Committee, which is responsible for all aspects of Quality Assurance of the Natural Sciences degree programmes. I was also a member of Senate from 2003 to 2015, and was a member of the Quality Assurance and Enhancement Committee and the Master’s Quality Committee (Business, Engineering & Physical Sciences). I have participated in or chaired several working parties of these committees.

7. Teaching Experience

  • Lecturing: I have taught and examined the following courses:
  • First year Vibrations and Waves (1991-1994)
  • First year Measurements and Errors (1993-1998) (new course)
  • Second year Atomic Physics (1995-1999) (new course)
  • Second year Optics (2005-2009)
  • Third year Atomic Interactions and Molecular Physics (1988-1991)
  • Applied Optics MSc lectures in Thin Films (1989-2000)
  • Optics and Photonics MSc lectures in Optical Measurement and Devices (new course) (2001-2 and one section of this course also given 2003-2007)
  • Postgraduate lectures in the Centre for Doctoral training in Controlled Quantum Dynamics: Ion Traps (part of Platforms for Quantum Technology) (2015 to present)
  • Second year Atomic Physics (2017 to present)
  • Examining: Apart from examining my own lecture courses, I acted as Chair of the Third Year Comprehensive Examinations Committee. These papers range over the whole of the undergraduate core syllabus and test in particular problem solving ability.
  • Laboratories: I was Head of Third Year Laboratory (1998-2002) and I was also a Demonstrator in the first year laboratory and the Optics MSc laboratory.
  • Tutorials: I have given small group tutorials to First, Second and Third year students; I am also the personal tutor for a number of students every year.
  • Project Supervision: I have supervised many third year BSc, fourth year MSci, and Optics and Photonics and Physics MSc projects, generally several each year in total. I have also hosted students from other universities taking placements here from abroad and summer UROP projects.
  • PhD supervision: I have supervised a total of approximately 30 PhD students in the area of laser spectroscopy and ion traps.
  • PhD examining: I have served as a PhD examiner for approximately 20 internal PhD students.
  • External lecturing: I have given lectures in the area of optical thin films, lasers and spectroscopy on various professional training courses at Imperial and elsewhere.
  • Outreach Activities: I have participated in several projects with children of various ages in schools, based on topics such as light, physics and music, and waves. Funding was obtained from the Institute of Physics and the Millennium Commission. I have also given several public lectures on subjects including lasers and musical acoustics. I have been interviewed for a number of radio and television programmes on subjects related to my research.

8. External Professional Activities

  • Journal Referee: I am a regular reviewer for several journals including Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Rev. A, Appl. Phys. B, Contemp. Phys., J. Phys. B, Opt. Comm. and J. Mod. Opt., Nature, Phys Lett B
  • Grant Proposals: I am a reviewer for several grant agencies in the UK and abroad including EPSRC, for which I have also served on prioritisation panels.
  • Editorial Boards: I have been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Contemporary Physics since 1992 and was the Book Reviews Editor from 1992 to 2004. I am also (since 2009) a member of the Editorial Board of Imperial College Press. I edited special issues of Journal of Modern Optics (1992) and Applied Physics B (2011) on ion trap related topics.
  • External Examining: I have been an undergraduate external examiner at three UK Universities (Sussex (2000-2004), St Andrews (2002-2006), and Surrey (2009-2013)) and as External PhD Examiner for approximately 25 students at UK and overseas universities.
  • Quality Assurance: I was appointed as a subject specialist reviewer for the QAA (1998-2000) and also for the TEEP European Quality Assurance project (2003). I have also acted as an external reviewer of the physics department at Durham University (2015) and of the undergraduate programmes at two university physics departments (Reading and Surrey).
  • Accreditation: From 2008 to 2013 I chaired the Accreditation Committee of the Institute of Physics, and have participated in the Institute of Physics accreditation reviews of physics programmes at several UK universities.
  • European Physics Education: I led the Imperial contribution to the EU-funded EUPEN education network of physics departments. This network studies and promotes new developments in physics education.
  • Invited Talks (Education): I was an invited speaker at the International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Saudi Arabia (2011). I was also invited to speak at a CBI meeting in 2009 and Westminster Education Forum events in 2008 and 2013.
  • Conference Organisation: I have been involved in the organisation of various scientific meetings, including:
  • Organising committee of the Applied Optics and Electro-Optics Conference, 1990
  • Publications Officer for ECAMP conference, 1995
  • Member of Programme Committee for EQEC Conference
  • Organiser of three one day meetings for the IOP Spectroscopy Group
  • Joint organiser of Young Researchers Policy Forum meetings at the IOP promoting dialogue between researchers and policy makers (1997-1999)
  • Joint organiser of the first European Conference on Trapped Ions, 2010
  • Organiser of one-day meetings for the Institute of Physics Higher Education Group
  • Joint organiser of the Ion Trap Winter School, Les Houches (2012 and 2015)
  • Invited Talks (Research): I have given invited talks at national and international conferences, including the National ATMOL conference in Belfast (1990); the European ECAMP Conference in Riga (1992); the National QEC conference (1993); the European EGAS Conference in Graz (1997); Modern Applications of Trapped Ions (Les Houches, 2008), SPARC Symposium (Lisbon, 2009), QION meetings in Tel Aviv, 2009, 2010 and 2012; Atomic and Molecular Physics Conference in Dharwad, India (2011). I lectured on Ion Traps at International Summer Schools in Mexico (1998) and Pakistan (1999) and at Les Houches in 2012 and 2015. I gave a series of lectures on ion traps at the University of Granada and the University of Mainz in 2016.
  • Research Seminars: I have given research seminars to groups in the United States, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Denmark and around the UK. I have given presentations about our work at meetings of national and European research networks in which my group participates.

9. Research Activities

My current research is in the area of laser spectroscopy of trapped ions. My previous work was concerned with atomic spectroscopy using classical interferometry. I have published approximately 60 papers in these general areas of physics during my career. I have been awarded 5 major UK research grants during this period and have participated in several European Union-funded Research Networks. In my laboratory we use a wide range of optical techniques and instrumentation as well as a variety of laser sources. My current research is centred on two activities: (1) studies of laser cooled trapped ions with a focus on their dynamics in the ion trap and quantum optical effects that can be investigated with this system, with particular application to quantum information processing and quantum simulation; (2) laser spectroscopy of the ground state hyperfine structure of trapped highly charged ions for tests of the theory of quantum electrodynamics at high fields. A short summary follows; full details can be found at www3.imperial.ac.uk/iontrap.

Following a PhD and postdoctoral work (in the UK and Germany) in different areas of classical and laser spectroscopy, I started to work in the area of ion traps and laser cooling in 1983 at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. I had the prime responsibility for designing, assembling and operating the apparatus. We achieved laser cooling (for the first time in the UK), and studied in some detail the dynamics of the ion cloud in different types of ion trap. I maintain an interest in this ongoing project at NPL and have supervised five PhD students working there.

I moved to Imperial in 1986. For many years by research was carried out in collaboration with my colleague Prof. D M Segal who died in 2015. One of the overall aims of our work with trapped and laser cooled ions is to study the dynamics of the ions, both through experimental measurements of different types and through a sound theoretical description of their interactions. We made observations of ion oscillation frequencies in ion traps using a new technique involving the observation of the spectrum of time intervals between detected photons from small clouds of ions or single ions in the trap. The work was extended to the observation of the (Wigner) crystallisation of clouds by this non-invasive and sensitive technique. In other experiments we developed a pulse-probe technique for oscillation frequency measurements. We developed the “axialisation” technique as a way of enhancing laser cooling for clouds of ions by irradiation at the cyclotron frequency. Our experimental work is complemented by computer simulations of small numbers of laser-cooled ions in a trap and by analytical work.

The second main aspect of our work concerns the study of quantum mechanical effects which become important when dealing with very small numbers of atomic particles at very low temperatures. Ion traps provide a very direct way to study such effects, of which quantum jumps provide a good example. In these experiments the quantum state of a single particle in a trap is monitored by observation of resonance fluorescence which switches on and off as the particle moves between two quantum states.

We have now moved on to a new experimental programme investigating the potential for the use of trapped ions in a Penning trap for quantum information processing. Quantum mechanical systems have the potential to be in a superposition of different states – in a sense, to be two things at the same time. This potential can be exploited by building a “quantum computer”, in which some types of calculation could be performed much faster than in a conventional computer. However, this potential can only be realised if the process of decoherence, which destroys the superposition state, is understood and minimised. Our work, funded by the EU and the EPSRC, constitutes a study of decoherence specifically in the Penning trap, while most related work concentrates on a different type of trap, the RF trap. In the course of this research, we demonstrated the first laser cooling in a Penning trap of an ion (calcium) with a complex level structure, and we discovered and characterised a novel quantum mechanical effect (J-mixing) specific to this system. We also demonstrated novel ion trap geometries for shuttling ions between difference traps.

More recently we have investigated the formation and manipulation of ion “Coulomb crystals” which are novel structures formed by laser-cooled ions in traps. These crystals have unusual and interesting properties and have the potential to act as “quantum simulators” – where one quantum mechanical system is used to simulate the behaviour of another type of system that it is not possible to investigate in such detail directly. We have demonstrated excellent control of the conformations of these crystals in a Penning trap for the first time and are continuing to study their applications.

We have also successfully cooled the axial motion of a single ion to its ground state – the first time this has been achieved in a Penning trap. The measured heating rate of the ground-state cooled ion has been measured to be extremely low, which demonstrates one of the potential advantages of the Penning trap for research on quantum information processing using trapped ions. This work has been extended to the ground state optical sideband cooling of all the axial modes of Coulomb crystals containing two and three ions.

In investigations of the coherence properties of the ions in our trap, we have demonstrated an extremely long coherence time of around one second for the motion of the ion. The coherence time remains very long even when the ion is in its excited electronic state. Our system can be well outside the usual “Lamb-Dicke Regime”, in which the interaction between ion and radiation takes a particularly simple form. As a result, several new and interesting effects arise in our experiments which are not seen in other systems, including the possibility of preparing the system in highly-excited motional states.

A third strand to our work is the use of highly-charged ions in traps for the study and measurement of the effects of quantum electrodynamics in atomic systems. Ion traps are potentially a powerful technique in this field as they provide a well-controlled and isolated environment where these ions, produced in large accelerator facilities, may be confined and studied. Quantum electrodynamics has not yet been tested critically at the high fields present close to a highly-charged nucleus, and such tests may provide important new information pointing to new aspects of the theory. We joined an EU network on this topic and also obtained EPSRC funding for our contribution to a collaboration based at the GSI research institute in Darmstadt, Germany. This SPECTRAP collaboration has made great progress in constructing and testing a precision ion trap to be attached to the beamline of the HITRAP facility being built for the production of beams of low-energy highly-charged ions. Apart from the design of the ion trap, our contribution to this project included detailed studies of a technique to be used for compressing the ion cloud, which we carried out at Imperial College. When the HITRAP facility is completed, we expect to be one of the first users of the facility for our experiments on hydrogen-like bismuth and lead.

A further collaboration at GSI relates to the measurement of transitions in highly-charged ions in the ESR storage ring, in which they move at velocities approaching the speed of light. I have participated in experiments using this facility where the ground state hyperfine transitions in hydrogen-like and lithium-like bismuth have been measured to high precision for a test of QED.

Alongside my research with trapped ions, I maintain an interest in the physics of music, which has been of interest to me, as a practising organist, for many years. I have not sought research council funding in this area, but I supervised final-year MSci project students for several years to work on the analysis of musical sounds using specially written software. One result of this work is a collaboration with the Royal College of Music on the analysis of the sounds of three historical harpsichords.

10. Complete list of Publications

3 books and 5 book chapters

71 peer-reviewed articles

10 published conference proceedings

16 other articles

(a) Book Chapters

  1. Thompson, R. C. “Spectroscopy with ion traps”, Adv At Mol Opt Phys 31, (1993), 63-136.
  1. Thompson, R. C. “Quantum optics with trapped ions” (Summer School Lectures), AIP Conf Proc 464, (1998), 111-148.
  1. Thompson, R. C. “Spectroscopy and quantum optics with trapped ions” (Summer school lectures), in Nathiagali Summer College, Pakistan (1999).
  1. Knoop, M. Madsen, N., Thompson, R. C., “Physics with Trapped Charged Particles” in Knoop, M. Madsen, N., Thompson, R. C. (eds), “Physics with Trapped Charged Particles” (Imperial College Press, 2013), pp 1-24.
  1. Knoop, M., Madsen, N., Thompson, R. C., “Penning traps” in Knoop, M. Madsen, N., Thompson, R. C. (eds), “Trapped Charged Particles” (Imperial College Press, 2016), pp 1-33.

(b) Refereed Articles