Quantum electronics/communication project ideas

[metalrose]

I am pursuing an undergraduate degree in electronics and communication engineering.
I intend to apply for grad school in physics after my undergrad.

We are starting off with minor projects From next semester, and i would like to work on something that has a strong overlap between physics and electronics/communication.

Quantum physics seems to have a huge overlap with electronics through semiconductor physics.

But i can't figure out the specific problems i could work on.

Im looking for some ideas which are primarily theoretical in nature because i am not really interested in lab work. Simulation would be fine.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[EWH]

One simple (well, really too simple) project is measuring Planck's constant from the slope of the line of LED voltages plotted vs. wavelengths - that's more a high-school lab than a grad school deal, though. A more theoretical investigation might be to explore some aspect of applications of polarization - well trodden ground, but very instructive. If you want something harder and more current, meta-materials, especially negative refractive index arrays might be a good area. Anything to do with the newer carbon allotropes (bucky-stuff, graphene) is fertile, too. More math/communication oriented is compressed sensing, perhaps you can tie in some quantum information theory.

I found some interesting analogies between analog filters and quantum mechanics, too. Here's a writeup:

Take a simple variable -frequency, -bandwidth (1/Q), and -gain
bandpass filter [for instance the one from from figure 5.19 on page
278 of Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" (2nd. ed.). (Four
op-amps plus some passive components).] One could get a precise view
of the frequency envelope by sweeping through the frequencies one tone
at a time, but this is slow and does not allow seeing the changes in
the envelope.

If a random "white noise" signal containing all frequency components
is used as an input, then the output spectrum reveals the
instantaneous envelope of the filter, which at high-Q resembles a
Dirac delta function, that is, a single spectral line, but at moderate
bandwidth has the form of a gaussian wavelet or sinc^2 function. As
the bandwidth increases, the ripples to either side of the passband
peak become larger and extend farther from the passband peak until the
filter envelope has the form of a comb filter, a sinusoidal shape
which seems to me like a cos^2 function. If the output of the filter
is shown simultaneously in time and frequency domain displays, when
the spectrum has a single line, the oscilloscope shows a sinusoid. The
time domain at low bandwidth (high Q) thus resembles the frequency
domain at high bandwidth (low Q), illustrating the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle (in its time-energy form). However, when the
bandwidth is high and the spectrum is sinusoidal, the oscilloscope
shows noise - the equivalent of quantum uncertainty.