Aephraim M. Steinberg
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Through Uncertainty principle
Early life and education
Steinberg was interested in science from a young age, asking questions to his father, an electrical engineer, about the behaviour of electrons in circuits. He completed an undergraduate degree at Yale University, then attended the University of California, Berkeley for his master's and doctorate. As a graduate student, he was particularly interested in open questions and apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics, though was told that he would hopefully "grow out of it". His 1994 thesis was entitled When can light go faster than light? The tunneling time and its sub-femtosecond measurement via quantum interference and it received an award from the American Physical Society. The publications containing the main results of Steinberg's doctoral work have been cited extensively and reached a wide audience through popular science publications like Scientific American.
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Career and research
In 2002, Steinberg started a quantum information research program with CIFAR, which has since been renewed multiple times. It supports fundamental research into quantum technology, including how best to utilize it for problems that are not tractable on current systems, and determining exactly what those problems might be.
In 2011, Steinberg was awarded first place by Physics World in its yearly "top 10 breakthroughs" for his work leading "weak measurements" to "to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young’s double-slit experiment". Conventional interpretation of the quantum uncertainty principle suggests that it is impossible to determine both the position and momentum of a particle, thereby preventing an observer from finding out what the trajectory of a particle was when passing through the slits to reach its final position on the screen. Weak measurement allows experimentalists to circumvent this limitation by performing measurements that provide minimal information, and also minimally perturb the system as popularized by Yakir Aharonov and others. Ensemble averaging over many such measurements leads to final, more accurate results. The work was carried out using pairs of entangled photons generated by quantum dots. The researchers probed polarization states of the photons to verify that the weak measurements did not disturb the system at the magnitude the uncertainty principle would suggest.
Another project exploiting properties of light was an experimental implementation of a method to resolve details beyond the Rayleigh Criterion with phase measurements.
Steinberg has led work aiming to quantify how long a particle spends tunnelling through a barrier, confirming that the process is not instantaneous. Experiments were carried out using cooled rubidium atoms guided through a laser beam as a barrier. By applying a magnetic field and measuring the atoms' spin before and after tunnelling, a time estimate was obtained.
Steinberg has stated that he enjoys encouraging physicists to embrace new perspectives, including asking "forbidden questions". He appeared in an episode of Through the Wormhole.