A story about dissapointments

Hello, I’m David. I like finding things out.

I write a Science blog called Scientia Potentia Est.

In this page you will find:

Selected publications

Research interests

Short bio

Selected publications

My thesis: "Towards optical quantum information processing using Rydberg dark-state polaritons"

D. Paredes-Barato and C. S. Adams, "All-Optical Quantum Information Processing Using Rydberg Gates", Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 040501 (2014)

D. Maxwell, D. J. Szwer, D. Paredes-Barato, H. Busche, J. D. Pritchard, A. Gauguet, K. J. Weatherill, M. P. A. Jones, and C. S. Adams, "Storage and Control of Optical Photons Using Rydberg Polaritons", Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 103001 (2013) (with an acompanying Viewpoint)

You will find most of my other publications in my Scholar profile.

Research interests

I have become interested in many research topics:

  • Quantum optics using cold atoms
  • Rydberg
  • Dipole-dipole interactions
  • Photon hopping
  • Quantum information processing
  • Feasibility of technological applications of quantum optics

Along with my interest in basic research, I believe that the discoveries made should get out of the laboratories and offices. Therefore, I am interested in teaching and other ways of communicating Science to both specialized and layman audiences.

Short bio

At the age of 11 or 12, during a hot summer, I started throwing stones into the air and timing them as they hit the ground to try and find out if I could somehow describe their motion. Obviously, I failed: I did not understand the importance of repeatability in experiments.

…thus I decided that I would become a Physicist.

Later, when I was studying Theoretical Physics in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), I really loved Differential Geometry and Relativity, but had to take some modules on Quantum Physics, and Atomic and Molecular Physics… and failed them (once): I did not understand the non-intuitive ways in which matter and light interact at the fundamental level! That’s why I decided to do research on Quantum and Atomic Optics.

And after spending a summer at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona working in Morgan Mitchell’s group, I landed in Durham. There, under the supervision of Charles Adams we studied the (highly) nonlinear properties of cold Rydberg gases and their interactions with light. Most of my work in Durham consisted in a proposal of a novel way to make photons interact in a way that is useful for quantum processing technologies.

Since there are a lot of things that I do not understand, I decided to go back to Barcelona and join Hugues de Riedmatten’s group to continue researching the strong photon-photon interactions induced by their propagation and storage in a cloud of cold Rydberg atoms, and their applications to quantum information, processing and communication technologies.