People > Vladan Vuletic > Biographical Background

Biographical Background

Professor Vladan Vuletic is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1992, he earned the Physics Diploma with highest honors from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and in 1997, a Ph.D. in Physics (summa cum laude) from the same institution.

While a postdoctoral researcher with the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, Professor Vuletic accepted a Lynen Fellowship at Stanford University in 1997. In 2000, he was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford and in June 2003 accepted an Assistant Professorship in Physics at MIT. He was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2004. He was named Lester Wolfe Associate Professor of Physics in 2005.

Professor Vuletic is currently working on two experiments, and preparing a third one: The first is concerned with a new laser cooling method that can be applied to particles with an arbitrary internal level structure and may provide a way to cool certain molecules with large polarizability in the optical domain. The second experiment uses currents flowing through conductors on a microfabricated chip to create and trap Bose-Einstein condensates. His group is also building an ion trap experiment using Ytterbium ions for quantum computation and communication.

The long term goal of all three experiments is to develop new methods to manipulate particles in a regime where the quantum mechanical aspects dominate their behavior and their properties. On the one hand, this should lead to new tools that allow one to probe physical laws and to measure fundamental constants with increasing precision. On the other hand, the progress of experimental methods also drives the advances in our understanding of the ever mysterious, beautiful, accurate, yet deeply dissatisfying structure of quantum mechanics. This interplay between theoretical concepts and experimental realizations promises to be very fertile in fields such as quantum control, quantum feedback and its limits, many-particle quantum systems, and many-particle entanglement (quantum computing).