The everyday life of a PhD-student in Quantum Optics

When Santa brings presents to all the children in one day he travels with a velocity of 1040 km per second. However, ordinary human beings do not have the ability to travel that fast on earth… , but we can do things that are even faster. As a PhD-student in Quantum Optics you work with single photons, which are propagating with around 300.000 km per second – much faster than the speed of Santa.

Beside this fun fact, there are a lot of things that make the everyday life of a PhD-student in Quantum Optics very interesting and diversified. Projects need to be discussed and appropriate experiments have to be planned and implemented. This leads to several hours of fabricating samples in the cleanroom and measuring optical properties in the lab. One challenging part are the losses in your setup, which have to be very low to go quantum. Besides the experimental part, working with both postdocs and student helpers gives you a good mix of accumulate and spread knowledge.

Working in the UNIQORN project includes a lot of communication between different project partners all over Europe, which leads to an interesting working environment.  All partners are part of fascinating and forward-thinking science, to supply affordable quantum communication for everyone.  This is a great motivation for a PhD-thesis.

Hopefully in the future our work is able to enrich everyone’s life, just as Santa does once a year.