(Video Provided by Optica Publishing Group)

 

 

Interview article:

 

Lan Yang. Photonics Research Interview with Professor Marlan Scully[J]. Photonics Research, 2022, 10(1): 256

 

Interview transcript

 

Kelly Cohen: Welcome everyone. I'm Kelly Cohen, Senior Publisher with The Optical Society.

 

I'm delighted to introduce our special webinar today. It's our first interview for a webinar series sponsored by Photonics Research, the Gold Open Access journal jointly published by Chinese Laser Press and The Optical Society.

 

Leading the interview is the Editor in Chief of Photonics Research, Prof. Lan Yang. She's with the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department at Washington University in St Louis, US. Professor Yang has been the editor since 2019. She's a Fellow of OSA, APS, IEEE and AAAS. Thank you for organizing this interview, Prof. Yang.

 

Lan Yang: Thanks, Kelly. Welcome everyone for attending this webinar. Let me give you a little bit more information about the webinars in this new series. We're going to interview scientists who have made groundbreaking discoveries in their fields of endeavor. In addition to this online interview, we're going to publish the text version of the interview transcript in the Photonics Research journal later. And I will encourage you to share it with others who might find this useful and insightful.

 

And today, it is my greatest honor to introduce our first scientist for this interview series. Prof. Marlan Scully from Texas A&M University in the United States, who is a world leader in the field of quantum optics. He has made numerous groundbreaking discoveries that include the first quantum theory of lasers with Willis Lamb. The first demonstration of lasing without inversion and the first demonstration of ultra-slow light in in hot gases, just to name a few. And on top of his accomplishments in research, I want to say one more thing about him. So here is a textbook I'm holding, Quantum Optics. This this textbook is more than 600 pages. Honestly, I have to say it is great commitment to write such a book with so many pages and it's a great reference, if you want to know more about quantum optics.

 

And today, we will start with a pre-recorded a video. That will be followed by a live session so stay with us. We have additional questions for Prof. Marlan Scully from the audience members during the registration process. We have selected questions for him for the live session, so there will be no additional questions from the audience today. Kelly, let's start with the pre-recorded video. It's 28 minutes.

 

Q1. Lan Yang: Prof. Marlan, it's great to see you today. Thanks a lot for giving us the opportunity to learn more about your legendary life experience. We know you have been in the area of quantum optics for many decades. Could you please let us know why you joined this area initially?

 

A1. Marlan Scully: Great question. From the point of view of those of us who are in quantum optics, it's really quantum mechanics. We're lucky to have a simple system like light and lasers, to work with. Another wonderful field is low temperature physics, in which we have large cryostats and a lot of technology necessary to get us down to the low temperatures at which superfluid helium shows itself. I was working in this field of low temperature physics, when the laser really started coming into its own. I was at Yale where Willis Lamb, the famous Lamb of the Lamb Shift who opened up quantum electrodynamics as a real field, field with theory and experiment. He was there at Yale working on lasers and I was doing the grading for his course in quantum mechanics. I had been fortunate to have quantum mechanics as an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming. A small school, but a jewel of a physics department. A wonderful Professor named Bob Bessey. I took quantum mechanics at a young age from him and got to graduate school and just kept taking the course until finally was privileged to be able to grade the course with Willis Lamb. So, at some point. I realized that low temperature physics is hard. These techniques are difficult and it's not an easy row to hoe. So, I was fortunate to have Lamb suggest, "Why don't you come over and work with me? We're trying to understand the fundamentals of lasers. How do we map the laser density matrix from below threshold to above threshold." So, he suggested this problem to me. And he said Schwinger had worked on it and been able to get things to his satisfaction, Schwinger's satisfaction. And I wouldn't either. But he suggested I try and there'll be enough there for a thesis. So, lucky me. I had Willis Lamb and such an interesting problem and it's beginning early days. And that's how I got into quantum optics, good luck and great people to work with.

 

Q2. Lan Yang: You've been in this field for such a long time. In your opinion, what are the most important discoveries or breakthroughs in the history of quantum optics?

 

A2. Marlan Scully: So, what's the most important impact of the field in quantum optics to our daily life? Certainly, the laser has been an unparalleled tool of great boon to us. And the transistor and the computer are other examples, but doing laser spectroscopy and doing optics is something that has opened up after the laser. Back in my day, the '60s when I was a student, optics was not a particularly exciting area. There was lots of neat stuff and interesting stuff, like Fabry–Pérot cavities and looking at spectra, but it wasn't a hot area. Along comes the laser. Wow. Now, we can do all kinds of spectroscopy. Think about Raman spectroscopy. Here we can look at the light, which is generated by an incident laser, and it is then bouncing off of a molecule, which is oscillating, so that the reflected light will have generally lower frequency. Downshifted. Stokes radiation, it's called. Oh, by the way, the guy who suggested this was a theorist. The early days of Smekal's work, before quantum mechanics, 1924. It was a great theoretical idea. But, then, along came Raman and he did the experiments and understood the physics and used sunlight. But only one photon in 10¹⁰ is converted into a Raman shifted photon. Wow, not much light, but with the laser, now you get a good signal. People like Boris Stoicheff in Canada were heroes in using the laser in this Raman spectroscopy. And, oh, by the way, when Stoicheff went to India, his spectral signature was there on Raman's wall.

 

So that's certainly an example of the fact that the laser has opened up this whole field of optics. Nonlinear optics, quantum optics, laser spectroscopy. What a great field this is today.

 

Q3. Lan Yang: That's great. Talking about spectroscopy, what you just said links to my next question. So, in addition to quantum optics, you made impressive contribution to sensing and spectroscopy technologies. For example, you have papers about the detection of anthrax spores by using femtosecond adaptive spectroscopic technologies and coherence Raman microscopy. So, what was the motivation to investigate this? Is there any story behind that?

 

A3. Marlan Scully: The question of how we address problems in our field and beyond our field is a very important question, and I always encourage students to approach applied physics and fundamental physics equally so that you're interested in questions that say of general relativity and looking at how you can probe black holes or gravitational radiation detected by a laser interferometer on the one hand. But looking at other important problems that are on the horizon. Back in the early days of the anthrax murders in Princeton of 2001, more or less, it was very clear that we needed a technique to detect anthrax much, much faster than the laboratory chemistry experiments or techniques that were used to decide whether some white powder of it came out with a mail was anthrax.

 

So, I began looking at this problem and just decided that we had a chance to use Raman spectroscopy. But Raman spectroscopy is still weak, as I said before, one photon in 10¹⁰ that's not enough signal. How about using coherent Raman? What do you mean "coherent"? I've got an ensemble of molecules and they're in the sample. Now I've got 10²⁰ molecules, a little sample that came from the mail. Now, if I can somehow orchestrate these molecules so they're oscillating coherently, then I can increase the signal by a factor of n. So, with ordinary Raman, the intensity comes in proportion to the number of items per milliliter. But with Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy (CARS), we can get the signal going like n². That's a nice, nice advantage. Unfortunately, you also begin to pick up the background and that clouds the signal, so that you're not able to really do what you want, with ordinary coherent Raman. Extraordinary coherent Raman, if you will. Extraordinary, because it goes like n². Yep, that's the good news. The bad news is that the noise also goes like n² and you can't tell them apart. So, I began looking at ways in which we could improve CARS, and, in particular, came up with this improved technique which we called Femtosecond Adaptive Spectroscopic Technique applied to CARS, i.e. FAST CARS.

 

It turned out that had some promise, so I went to DARPA and told them what we were thinking, and they said, "Oh, that won't work". But, it's a very important problem. So, here's a million dollars. Go find out why it won't work. I went back to Texas and got together with some of our guys and we decided that we can show them why it very likely would work. We went back a little bit later and they said, "Yeah, that's great. Here's $10 million. Now go do the experiments." Well, we needed femtosecond lasers, but we didn't have them. Indeed, and in those times, in the early part of the century, the femtosecond lasers were available at a few labs like Michigan and like Princeton. So, I called my friends at Princeton, where I have a lot of colleagues. I said, "Here's what we're doing. What do you think?" And they said, "Well, we've got so many people who want to use these lasers, that only our faculty can use them, but if you'd be willing to come as a visiting professor, we'll talk it over."

 

So, I went for a "job interview" and I presented a technique. A guy in the back of the room jumped up and he said, "This is crazy. You're wrong. It's well known that CARS doesn't work because you have to amplify the noise blah blah blah." Well, I didn't want to argue with the guy. I wanted to use his laser, right? I said, "Well, I always want my strongest criticism from my friends in private, not my enemies in public. So, thank you for your question." He says, "Well, I count 200 people here in the room. This is not private and we're not your friends." (Laugh) I go on with my case I just have to say, "You're wrong and here's why." I explained my position and he and I argued for a week and converted him into a believer. We worked on the problem for a couple of years at Princeton and at A&M. We were learning to use and make these lasers. And my friends here at A&M, Alexi Sokolov and some of the bright students actually got it going before the guys at Princeton got it going.

 

The key point is that anthrax is 17% by weight of something called calcium dipicolinate. Picture benzene, knockout one of the carbon atoms put in a nitrogen called pyridine, and now attach two carboxylic acid molecules, COOH. You get the picture that you've got something simple: 16, 17 atoms in this molecule. The number of spectral lines is not overwhelming.

 

We went through the ropes of learning how to do this FAST CARS and before we were done we could take a sample of anthrax white powder to do ordinary Raman measurements, which people at Princeton had learned to do back in the 1970s. Takes five minutes, maybe, maybe a little less, maybe a minute, but takes a long time. And here, you'd like to be able to probe an envelope as it sweeps through the mail at a millisecond or 10 milliseconds or some such time. Well, we finally got this FAST CARS technique working so that we could spot anthrax in a nanosecond. Maybe a microsecond, even, but very fast. That kind of advance in the utility of this technique led us to look at other ways to apply CARS and FAST CARS to spectroscopy such that, when the COVID problem came along, we were there right away. And had the good fortune to be working with our German colleagues. A guy named Volker Deckert was here with us and had many interesting ideas about how we could use these techniques to advantage. We did, in fact, we learned to make the FAST go with enhanced resolution, so he suggested, let's call it FASTER CARS. That's indeed what we did.

 

Using these techniques now to spot a single COVID 19 virus and to scan out using tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, another bit of jargon. But take a very tiny tip like you see in the atomic force microscope. You run this tiny tip across the surface and do Raman measurements of the amino acids on the surface and we get great resolution.

 

To make a long story long that's the anthrax activity going on here in our lab.

 

Q4. Lan Yang: Wow, Professor Scully. Thanks a lot for sharing your amazing story with us. Actually, you just answered my next question. Because, naturally, I was planning to ask a question about COVID-19 virus detection, which is seems to be one of your research interests now. And also, for what you just said, now I see the secret behind your success. In addition to your wisdom, I clearly see the confidence, persistence and the leadership to draw people into one strong team to work on something that is important.

 

And also, talking about leadership, I wanted to ask you another question which is related to a significant contribution you made to the community. So, what were your reasons to start the Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics, which is also known as PQE? I have attended this conference a couple of times and was truly impressed by the quality of the talks. So, how did you start this? It has been over 50 years, right? What was your motivation to make this happen?

 

A4. Marlan Scully: Well, I was at Arizona and I began working with people at Los Alamos and at Kirtland Research Laser Lab there in Albuquerque. They were all great skiers. They said, gee, you know what would really be great (because they're going to learn optics and learn quantum techniques) and it will really be great if we could have a meeting at someplace interesting like this new Snowbird, Utah, slope that's opening up. We could go there and we can go to meetings in the morning, ski in the afternoon, and then come back and go to meetings in the evening. So, we did that. Well, it was a big hit, and not only was it fun, it was also an excellent way to do science, because you're tired after, say, lectures from 8am till 11:30. And now, if you can go out and ski and you're sitting in a ski lift next to say Julian Schwinger, (that was the highlight of my PQE activity) you can talk to them in a relaxed mode and you can enjoy the opportunity to argue in in a very friendly and very excellent environment. So, we continued doing this and 50 years later we're still doing it too. Physics of Quantum Electronics has been quite successful and we've had a lot of people who've come to us and gone on to win the Nobel Prize and many guys who are now leaders in our field. It's a kind of community, a kind of a family of people who join us each year. Now it's two or three hundred and we get to know each other in ways that we couldn't or wouldn't if we were simply meeting at the New York Physical Society meeting or some such. Thank you for the question.

 

Q5. Lan Yang: Thanks a lot for answering my question because, as I said, I have been there and was truly impressed by the talks and also the way people communicated with each other. I think it's a great example of life work balance, as shown in that particular conference. Thanks a lot for leading this effort for so many years. Next, would you like to say something about your current research interests?

 

A5. Marlan Scully: I guess I can answer that by saying what was I doing before COVID hit us. I was working on the problem which was brought to me by David Lee, Nobel Prize for showing that Helium-3 can be superfluid. David was at Yale, and after that Cornell, I was fortunate to hire him here at Texas A&M, Texas atomic and molecular university, if you will. David came in one day and said "How come the Hawking entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area of the black hole and not the volume?" So, I said, "What a great question. I don't know the answer. I'll work it out or take it out of the textbooks and come and tell you." I looked in the textbooks and it wasn't really there the way I wanted to see it, so I worked out an alternative point of view, which used Unruh radiation. Great guy. Bill Unruh was one of the people who gave us deep insights into black hole radiation after Hawking. I used Bill's techniques and came up with a new kind of black hole radiation, by looking at light that an atom emits as it falls into a black hole. Well, I'm fascinated. I called Bill and told him what we were doing. He came down and spent a year with us and now he's joined our faculty here and will be moving in as soon as we get cleared out from the COVID debris.

 

That's one example of what we're interested in and what I would like to do much more of if I can find some spare time to work on this. And to look at the way in which, let me say this slowly, the way in which quantum optics and squeezed light has a very deep connection to this kind of black hole, Hawking Unruh radiation. Squeezed light. Entanglement. Black hole radiation. Hawking radiation. By golly, it's entangled! Isn't that neat. How can that be? I'd like to advertise this book, Quantum Optics, with Suhail Zubairy, my wonderful colleague down the hall. Here is an example of ways in which quantum optics, and this is theoretical quantum physics, is able to interface with, contribute to in some way, be enriched by in a deeper way, a field as remote as general relativity and black hole physics. So that's one thing that I'm very interested in. I hope to get back to that, but I still feel like we haven't finished our job with the COVID-19 problem.

 

Q6. Lan Yang: Professor Scully, thanks a lot for your time. Now, I wanted to ask you the last question. What would be your advice to young researchers who want to pursue research in quantum optics? What background knowledge should be acquired that before diving into it?

 

A6. Marlan Scully: First, find a problem that you're really interested in. Don't go into some area because you think it's going to make you wealthy. Find something that really interests you, which may be economics and international currency. Okay. Fine. Same thing. In quantum optics, as we come into this field, we have our huge array of problems to choose from. We have problems which are very fundamental. Entanglement. How can we use squeezed light to advantage, to make a better microscope? These are problems which, on the one hand, are very fundamental. On the other hand, they have applications. Whatever your main interest is, think about ways in which you can apply these techniques to advantage and make a good living. In my case, I was interested in lasers. I found early on that the laser gyroscope was of interest in industry and I spent decades consulting on the laser gyroscope. It was not so interesting to me that I would have done that, as my first choice of problems, but it was very interesting once we got into it. Get something going which you really like and you'd like to understand better. For example, how is it that we can use entangled radiation to advantage in in making a spectroscopic measurement, making a Raman measurement? And then, how can I apply these ideas in detecting single virus cells or single cancer elements. That's my soapbox and I'm always happy to give you that sermon.

 

Q7. Lan Yang: Excellent! That is great advice. Although I'm not young research anymore, I was able to take that wholeheartedly. I think your advice applies to researchers and any stages and ages.

 

Okay, great. Everyone, thanks for staying online with us. Now we're going to move to the live session.

 

Professor Marlan Scully, it's great to see you again. Let's continue our conversation. Here comes my first question for today. Could you tell us about the worldwide competition and collaboration in the early days of understanding of the physics of lasers, especially the quantum statistical nature of lasers and also how it is different from spontaneous emission?

 

A7. Marlan Scully: Good. Before I do that, let me go back to the question of applying optics in new and novel ways. Our host here, Professor Yang, has been able to use whispering gallery modes, tiny little resonators, to advantage, and has actually built a company around this technology. Great example. Coming to your question, thank you.

 

I would be very happy to tell you about the early days of quantum mechanics. You sent me a list of questions. Thanks a lot. I'm very interested still in these questions of non-equilibrium and thermodynamics and Bose condensation in living matter, as Fröhlich taught us to think about the problem. Let me then address your first question. What is the statistical nature of lasers, that makes it different from spontaneous emission? Fair question. Let's go back further. Let's go back to 1905 when Einstein used the fluctuation properties of light. He had Planck's distribution. He understood statistical mechanics in a deep and novel way, and he started looking at fluctuation, variance in the amount of energy. He didn't know about photons. Nobody did. They thought Maxwell gave us the right story, and that was the end of it. But then Einstein found that by looking at the entropy of this thermal radiation Planck had studied so successfully, he came to the point of realizing there are two components to the entropy of thermal light, one which is wave-like and another which is particle-like.

 

He said, therefore, light has this dual nature. He came up with the photon concept. At the end of his paper he said "I don't see that this violates the photoelectric effect." It was studying fluctuations and studying the statistical properties of light way back at the beginning that led Einstein to the photon concept. Now, fast forward 50 years, 60 years, when we are looking at problems of high intensity lasers. Glauber and others taught us that the density matrix representing such a coherent source of radiation is simple. It has a Poisson statistical distribution of photons and that's what has often now been called the Glauber coherent state. Radio waves are a good example of Glauber coherent state, but what about the laser? It's somewhere in between. Think about the helium neon laser, which is what we were mostly focusing on back in the 1964-1965 era. What's the density matrix describing the radiation as it passed from below threshold, where it's thermal, explained by Einstein, to above threshold, where it's coherent, described by Glauber? Now, we didn't know and Glauber gave insight into that question.

 

Glauber said in his famous laser lectures concerning this question of laser radiation, let me read to you. "The only reliable method we have of constructing density operators is to devise theoretical models of the system under study and to integrate corresponding Schrödinger equation." He says, "These assignments are formidable ones for the case of the laser oscillator and have not been carried out. It's unlikely that we're going to get this done." I'm going to let my associate, Dr. Ye, read this last part.

 

"Nonlinearity really plays an essential role in stabilizing the field generated by lasers. It seems unlikely, therefore, that we should have a quantum mechanically consistent picture of the frequency bandwidth of the laser or of the fluctuations of its output until further progress is made with these problems."

 

So, that's Glauber speaking in his Les Houches lectures in 1964. That was the problem that Lamb had assigned me. Of course, I hadn't seen Glauber's statement or I would have been somewhat scared off, but I had the Summer to work on it. Lamb came back and we found that, indeed, the density matrix for the laser radiation could be found using an analysis which emphasized the nonlinearity inherent in laser behavior. I'm going to come back to that in a moment concerning the Bose condensate. But that's the essence of what's going on in laser radiation and how it's different from coherent light.

 

Did that address the first question properly? Can I go to the second?

 

Q8. Lan Yang: Yes, Professor Marlan. I feel like you're like a dictionary about laser physics and laser science. If we want to know anything about the history of lasers, we can just open it. Thanks a lot for helping us to understand some part of the history. It is very helpful.

 

I wanted to move on to the next question which is kind of related to the history of laser development, because lasers are part of your research. Among the numerous research accomplishments, which one are you most proud of?

 

A8. Marlan Scully: I have to think about that, when you asked me that question. I would turn it around and say, which problem did I enjoy most and was I most excited about when it worked out? Well, of course, being a dumb graduate student working out the quantum theory of the laser, that was fun and I had Willis Lamb, talking to him every day. That was great. But go from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, along comes the Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a weakly coupled gas, essentially an ideal gas, and the atoms are obeying both statistics. The wonderful researchers did the experiments, then were being summarized by Dan Kleppner at MIT. Dan is the guy who really got everybody started on this problem. It was for a long time thought by many people, including me, that it wouldn't work. What might happen is that we just get frozen gases. Helium works, because of its Zitterbewegung effect, it's zero-point fluctuations. But if you put a big atom in here, like rubidium, and another big atom you can polarize and stick together, I thought. Well, luckily, we were wrong and it did work. Then, Dan Kleppner wrote an article that appeared in Physics Today. He said that the Bose-Einstein condensate is really like a laser. It's a cooperative phenomenon taking place between the atoms. This type of physics is a lot like the laser, so we'll call it the atom laser. Oh boy. Lamb called me. He was still at Arizona. By that time, I had moved on to the Max Planck in Germany and here in Texas. He called me and said, "Look, this is crazy. I want you to go prove that this is wrong." The way to prove it is to show that these weakly interacting atoms have essentially no nonlinearity. Right, the atoms are not experiencing the kind of nonlinearities that photons experience, photons interacting through the presence of a gain medium, so go show that this is all wrong. And I agreed with him.

 

I started working and it turned out to be an interesting problem. A couple months found later I found that, gosh, they're right. The kind of mathematics and the results that we got from the quantum theory of the optical laser, were precisely the way the equations came out after a lot of hard work. This is no "Oh, this is just like that, and therefore." This was just taking a reasonable model and following it through in great detail. Gee whiz, I found the same equations and I found the same density matrix that describes a laser near threshold, the helium neon laser. I was stunned and excited, so I call Lamb. I said, "Well, guess what? Kleppner is right. It is exactly an atom laser. Willis said, "Well, that's crazy. Send me your calculations." I wrote it up and sent it to him. He said, "Well, I haven't really gotten my arms around it, yet, but I don't like it." I typed it up, put his name on it, sent it back to him. He said, "No way, I'm not going to publish this with you. This is really terrible. I'm really angry with you for bringing me this result." He started beating me about head and shoulders. I said, "Well, you know, Willis, the only way you can have a friend for 40 years is to know someone for 40 years and remain on cordial terms with them. You don't have very many people like that. You've got me. What are you going to do, push me away?" I was joking around, of course, a little bit. Lamb said, "Yeah, you know you're right, so you go ahead and publish it and don't put my name on it and we'll stay friends." So, I did, and it turned out that even today people are doing experiments and finding that the fluctuations in the Bose Einstein condensate, the atom laser, are much like they are for a photon laser. Very interesting result.

 

So, that now feeds into the business of biophysics and what we like to call biophotonics. Fröhlich, one of the early heroes of superconductivity. He was the first guy to point out that phonon-electron interactions were important, back in the early 50s. Then, along came Bardeen and Cooper and Schrieffer and they use this to get the BCS theory, not like Bose-Einstein. It is very interesting, however, Fröhlich made this original early contribution. Now, he also about that time was saying, "You know, in living matter, it seems to me that there may well be a sense in which there is a kind of Bose condensation going on, a kind of coherent phenomena." I didn't think much about it for many years. But, within the last decade or so, our friend in Washington, Dr. Bin-Salamon had stimulated this and we've done the theory of the molecular protein and its vibrational modes, longitudinal vibrational modes, and it obeys the same kind of mathematics and the same results that Bose condensation and that the laser obey. Looking at superfluidity and Bose condensation, all of this stuff is a real area of great amusement and experiments. These problems are going forth. So let me stop there, because you gave me another interesting question.

 

Q9. Lan Yang: Okay, what an experience. Actually, I learned three things from your answer. First, you tell us the beauty of science. You know, naturally, humans have curiosity about things, and from what you have experienced, we clearly see a lot of curious things and surprise happens. Here, was a curious thing, and interesting things happen. So, doing science satisfies our need for curiosity. The second, it shows sometimes is not a bad thing to show we are wrong. Because, clearly, in this case we are wrong, but it's a great thing. The third thing I learned, I think you're not only a scientist, I think you are philosopher. Also, you clearly tell us the meaning of PhD is Dr of Philosophy. Because there are so many philosophical things we can learn from your scientific journey Thanks a lot for your answer.

 

I will jump to the next interesting question. It surely comes from someone who wants to make an important contribution to science. He asked, "What is your advice for asking great questions in research?"

 

A9. Marlan Scully: Okay. Well, first pick an area that has promise. You can see that there is a lot to be gained, if you can solve the problem. I would say quantum biology is such a field. Now there, I have to define quantum biology. On the one hand, I could say it's using the techniques that we have in laser spectroscopy, like FAST CARS and FASTER CARS to map out the amino acids on the surface of the COVID-19 virus. Well, that's going on here. There is an example of what we might call applying quantum optical techniques to biology. On the other hand, they're deep questions, which cause us to think again. Like, Fröhlich's question. Is there some connection between Bose condensation and as we would say today, lasers and living matter?

 

In that sense, is there, perhaps, some interesting and unexpected result that we might learn by studying this problem? The answer is likely "yes". The first person, I think, to really nail that question in a philosophical mode was Roger Penrose, who got the Nobel Prize this year for his pathbreaking contributions to black hole physics. He asked, is there any sense in which quantum computers might be an aspect of what's going on in the brain? Everybody says, well, probably not because it's so hot in there that you're going to be rubbing out any coherence that's generated. In his wonderful book, The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose says, yeah, that's probably right, but the last word has not been uttered.

 

What kind of problems should you pick? Pick a problem that interests you. Right now, I'm very interested in this question of Penrose. Can we use quantum coherence and entanglement, for example, as in superradiance, to teach us more about biology and the possibility that there could be quantum activity going on in the brain? That's quantum mechanical. So, pick a problem that interests you. Have fun with it and stick to it.

 

I have to give myself negative points there. I have a lot of colleagues around. We solve problems, maybe faster than we write them up. I look back five years later, and I say, darn, we never wrote that up. Very frequently, other people write it up for us, and we say. Well, we knew it was a good problem. So that's my advice to youngsters: don't quit till to publication.

 

Q10. Lan Yang: That's great. Thanks for your advice. It also emphasized persistence is very important, especially for young students. You know, when you work on a challenging problem, you will see, you will experience frustration. You know, depression, pressure. But hang in there and you will do something great, as long as you work on the right problems.

 

Prof. Scully, I want to ask you another question about service. In addition to organizing the PQE conference, you have been serving on many program committees and award committees. How have you benefited from being a volunteer in the community? What is your advice to younger researchers and how they can get more involved?

 

A10. Marlan Scully: Right. Well, my problem is I get a kick out of physics and I'm kind of like everybody else. I gravitate toward what's fun and easy and sometimes I don't spend enough time worrying about younger colleagues. Later I look back and think, gee, I wish I'd spent more time with xyz. So, be especially careful in touting the results of your colleagues. Dudley Herschbach, Nobel Prize in chemistry and a great chemical physicist on our faculty here for a decade. He's a great example of a case in point. He's always looking around, trying to see who it is that he can help and trying to do what you're doing Professor Yang, taking time out, edit a journal. That's really admirable. I could never do that. But I do try to help my younger colleagues and students and that's a big thrill. For example, my student Wolfgang Schleich, who was a PhD student with me in Germany back in in the early 80s, has now successfully brought in 700 million euros from the federal government to the researchers in universities around Germany. What a great accomplishment. It's a great thrill on my part, too, to see him doing that. Always keep an eye out for what you can do for your colleagues, because you will get a big kick out of it. See what you can nominate them for. Talk to them about what they would like and you'll get a lot more fun out of life doing that. One great thinker said, the way to save your life is to lose your life. Spend your life working to help other people. His name is Jesus Christ. Great philosopher. That's my soapbox on that subject.

 

Q11. Lan Yang: That's great wisdom. I will wrap up our interview with one last question. It is about the personal side because life work balance is very important. What are your hobbies outside of work? You have been referred to as "quantum cowboy." Is there any story about that?

 

A11. Marlan Scully: Yeah. Maybe I was a little more aggressive than I should be when I was a young professor. I ended up with people saying things like, Oh, Scully shoots first, asks questions later. Then, of course, I grew up on ranches in the backwoods of Wyoming. Hobbies were, for example, mountain climbing up Devil's Tower and mountains in Wyoming. Even on to Yale where we had a great mountain climbing club that David Lee was part of. Fishing, ranching, these were activities that I enjoyed and still enjoy. Somehow, I got stuck with this business of being kind of a cowboy, maybe in shooting from the hip, somewhat. That's I think how that got started. Then the fact that we have a couple working ranches probably played into it.

 

Lan Yang: Got it. Thanks a lot, Prof. Scully. One hour is really too short to cover all the exciting and unforgettable moments in your life journey. However, there is a proverb that says a single conversation with a wise person is better than ten years of study from books. That describes how I feel our conversation today. I glimpse some highlights from your life journey, it's invaluable for us. As a well-accomplished researcher, your advice is especially insightful and useful for many of us. Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences with us.

 

Now, I will take the next few minutes to talk about Photonics Research which sponsors this webinar.

 

Photonics Research is a Gold Open Access journal, that is co-published by OSA and Chinese Laser Press, also known as CLP. It publishes fundamental and applied research progress in optics and photonics. The current Impact Factor of the journal is 6.09. It is ranked 10th out of 97 journals in the ISI optics category. Our authors benefit from the promotion of their research through various platforms and channels supported by CLP and OSA such as popular WeChat posts and email campaigns.

 

Every year, we have feature issues to keep the community up-to-date on the progress of topics in fast moving areas. Here examples of feature issues we started last year. Two have been published. One is about topology photonics and another one is about perovskite photonics. The one on deep learning in photonics is in press. This year our feature issue on next generation silicon photonics is on the way.

 

You are encouraged to send us a proposal for the next feature issue on a subject that is of broad interest to the optics and photonics community.

 

I also wanted to mention the Editor in Chief Choice Award that comes with 10,000 Chinese dollar RMB. The amount of cash by no means reflects the value of the work selected for this award. Every year we receive many manuscripts of high quality and high-impact work. We established this award to show appreciation for the community. You may wonder about the criteria for this Award. It is simple. We value the quality, significance and impact of work. Over the years we have found great discoveries could come from established groups, a young group, a big group, or a small group. The recipients could be theoreticians or experimentalists. I wish you the best luck to be the recipient for the next award.

 

In summary, in my view, a journal, ultimately, is a venue to publish and disseminate scientific discoveries from researchers. Its reputation is built on the quality of the research published there. I look forward to receiving your high-quality research and we'll try our best to promote your work through our channels. If you have any questions about the journal, or, a suggestion of the next scientist we should interview, please don't hesitate to send an email to us.

 

I want to thank all of you for joining us. Tremendous thanks to Professor Scully for sharing his remarkable experience with us and for enlightening us with his wisdom and advice. And, I am thankful beyond words for his support for us, for the community, for his contribution to science. I really think we are fortunate to have him with us today.

 

Prof. Scully, thank you for spending time with us today. I wish you all the best and look forward to meeting you in the future.

 

In the end, I wish everyone a great day.