Squeezing more out of a laser

A laser's intensity can be stabilized by negative feedback from a conventional photodetector. I propose extraction of sub-shot-noise light from the feedback loop at a beam splitter by illuminating the back side of the beam splitter with squeezed-state light

Predicting Future Duration from Present Age: A Critical Assessment

Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including the longevity of the human species. Though Gott's proposal contains a grain of truth, it does not have the universal predictive power that he attributes to it.Comment: 17 pages, standard LaTeX; to be published in Contemporary Physic

Particle-Number-Conserving Bogoliubov Approximation for Bose-Einstein Condensates Using Extended Catalytic States

We encode the many-body wavefunction of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the $N$-particle sector of an extended catalytic state. This catalytic state is a coherent state for the condensate mode and an arbitrary state for the modes orthogonal to the condensate mode. Going to a time-dependent interaction picture where the state of the condensate mode is displaced to the vacuum, we can organize the effective Hamiltonian by powers of ${N}^{-1/2}$. Requiring the terms of order ${N}^{1/2}$ to vanish gives the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Going to the next order, $N^0$, we derive equations for the number-conserving Bogoliubov approximation, first given by Castin and Dum [Phys. Rev. A $\textbf{57}$, 3008 (1998)]. In contrast to other approaches, ours is well suited to calculating the state evolution in the Schr\"{o}dinger picture; moreover, it is straightforward to generalize our method to multi-component BECs and to higher-order corrections.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figur