Audimax Podcast with Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and Lee Rozema

Working on questioning essentially everything

13. December 2022 by Daniel Schenz, Lisa Kiesenhofer

Quantum physicists Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and Lee Rozema work on challenging the fundamental principles of physics and how we think of our everyday life. In this podcast, they talk about their work life: They discuss how experimentalists and theoreticians are entangled, how they deal with their own uncertainties and the current trajectories of their fields.

Portrait picture of Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and Lee Rozema.

Quantum physicists Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and Lee Rozema are excited about challenging fundamental principles not only of physics, but of how we are trained to think about the everyday life. © Daniel Schenz

De la Hamette (blurred) holds up a piece of white chalk.

"We spend a good chunk of our day at the blackboard discussing together and disagreeing on things, disagreeing on what certain results could mean – and in order to really visualise our thoughts and write down some equations, we like to do that with some chalk on the blackboard," says Anne-Catherine de la Hamette. © Daniel Schenz

Lee Rozema (blurred) hold up a small black disk with a transparent yellow centre.

"A non-linear crystal looks just like a yellowish piece of glass and is designed so that if we shine the right kind of laser on it, it will shoot out pairs of photons. This is a technique we use at the start of almost every experiment in our lab. So, our lab really wouldn't work without these sorts of crystals," says Lee Rozema. © Daniel Schenz

Lee Rozema and Anne-Catherine de la Hamette sit at a table and talk with each other.

At the University of Vienna, theoreticians like Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and experimentalists like Lee Rozema work side by side to explore what's next in quantum physics. © Lisa Kiesenhofer

Anne-Catherine de la Hamette obtained her Bachelor and Master degrees in physics from ETH Zurich. While completing her Master’s, she was a Visiting Graduate Fellow in the quantum foundations group at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. At the end of 2020, she joined the University of Vienna as a PhD student in the Brukner group of quantum foundations and quantum information.

Currently, she is exploring fundamental questions at the interface of quantum physics and gravity, with a particular focus on quantum reference frames, their connection to indefinite causal structures, and the phenomenology of quantum gravity.

Lee Rozema is a Senior Scientist working at the University of Vienna in the Quantum Information Science and Quantum Computation group with Philip Walther. Prior to that, he held a two-year Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-2016) and a three-year Templeton Independent Research Fellowship (2016-2019) in the same group in Vienna. Originally from Canada, Lee completed his Doctorate at the University of Toronto, Canada in 2014 under the supervision of Aephraim Steinberg.

His doctoral research focused on a broad array of topics in experimental quantum optics and quantum measurement, from quantum-enhanced precision measurement to more fundamental topics, such as weak measurement and interpretations of quantum mechanics. His current research interests include quantum foundations, photonic quantum computing, and the investigation of plasmon-enhanced optical nonlinearities for applications in nonlinear quantum optics.

Transcript of the Audimax Podcast with Anne-Catherine de la Hamette and Lee Rozema PDF | 305 KB

Blog: Daily life in the Quantum Nanophysics group

In the most recent "Human of University of Vienna" blog article, Tomas describes his daily life in the Quantum Nanophysics group and highlights the group's world record for the biggest molecule to behave like a quantum wave.

Working on questioning essentially everything

Blog: Daily life in the Quantum Nanophysics group

Pain is individual: Towards personalised therapy

Healing a world in crisis: AI as a double-edged sword

Animal venoms: The key to the brain?

"It smells of Vienna"

The art of urban well-being

Ready for the heat island?

Discover Vienna with all your Senses

"We should not be afraid of AI"

Artificial intelligence: The researcher ex machina

Misinformation and Emotions on Social Media