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Milestone 11

Quantum light

Quantum optics

Nature Materials volume 9, pages S12–S13 (2010)Cite this article

The revolutionary insight by James Clerk Maxwell that light is an electromagnetic wave, and the equations he set up to describe it formally (Milestone 2), still serve "as the basis for the discussion and analysis of virtually all the optical instrumentation we have ever developed", as Roy Glauber put it in his 2005 Nobel lecture. "That overwhelming and continuing success may eventually have led to a certain complacency."

This Nobel Prize came exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein had introduced the concept of light quanta, following Max Planck's work on black-body radiation (Milestone 3). Still, by the middle of the past century, the granular nature of light did not seem to play a significant role in optics. Even today, when we talk about lasers, holography and photonic bandgaps, these are phenomena that do not demand the quantization of light. Beginning in the 1960s, however, there has been a growing appreciation of a distinct non-classical variety of light, which gave rise to an entire new field of research: quantum optics.

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  1. Senior Editor, Nature Physics,

    Andreas Trabesinger

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  1. Andreas Trabesinger
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Trabesinger, A. Quantum light. Nature Mater 9 (Suppl 1), S12–S13 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2648

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