New Humboldt fellow at the Faculty of Sciences

Dr. Bharath Srivathsan, Chair of Experimental Physics (Optics)

The ability to precisely control the interaction between light and atoms is crucial for advancing quantum technology. Many scientists have one long-term goal: To build quantum computers that exceed the power of today’s computers many times over. Dr. Bharath Srivathsan who is a new Alexander von Humboldt scholarship holder working at both FAU and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light is also doing research in this field. His main research priority is experimental quantum optics, the interaction between light and atoms and quantum computing. In Professor Gerd Leuchs’ research group, Bharath Srivathsan studies how light can be efficiently coupled with a single atom. ‘It would be the holy grail in quantum optics if we could bring an atom from its ground state into an excited state with only one photon,’ he explains.

Srivathsan finished his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences in Goa, India, and later obtained his doctoral degree at the National University of Singapore. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) since April 2015. In November 2016, he received a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers, which he used for his research at FAU and MPL.