Researchers in optics and photonics have found the perfect tools to explore quantum mechanics.
The progress in microfabrication of electronic structures has uncovered new phenomena characteristic of the mesoscopic size scale, intermediate between bulk solids and a microscopic system such as an atom for which the energy level spacing is large compared to kT at room temperature. Yale researchers were amongst the first theorists to emphasize the novel properties of mesoscopic systems which differentiate them from macro and micro systems. Most prominent among these are phase coherence and sample-specific fluctuations in all physical properties, and the appearance of effects relating to the discreteness of electron or cooper pair charge. Related properties are high sensitivity to geometry and surface effects which can be analyzed from the semiclassical point of view in terms of regular or chaotic electron trajectories; this gives a connection to the field of quantum chaos which has been widely studied in the past decade in atomic, condensed matter and optical physics.
