Distinguished Professor Peter Drummond

Biography

Professor Drummond was educated at Auckland and Waikato University (NZ), and Harvard University in the USA. He was an academic at Auckland and Queensland Universities, and a researcher at Rochester University,  IBM Research Laboratories (USA), and NTT Basic Research Laboratories (Japan). He has also been a  visiting professor at Waikato University (NZ), Erlangen University, Heidelberg University, Ecole Normale Superieure (France), the Weizmann Institute for Science, Harvard University, and the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (USA). He is a University Distinguished Professor and Science Director of the Center for Quantum and Optical Science at Swinburne University of Technology. He is currently Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters, the most cited journal in physics.

He has published  260 research papers  in refereed journals, with 16500 Google scholar citations, and a Hirsch h-index of 67, as well as a co-authored and an edited research textbook. A public domain software package, XMDS, for stochastic differential equations (maintained at ANU) has had over 40,000 downloads, with a second package, xSPDE, now publicly available on github. A central research theme is the dynamics of many-body quantum systems. This is a challenging frontier in theoretical physics, often thought to be computationally intractable.

Drummond developed the positive-P phase-space representation, leading to the first exact stochastic equations for bosonic (integer spin) quantum fields. The results have been experimentally verified in numerous experiments around the world, including a co-authored front cover paper in Nature. This work is now featured in several texts as the preferred technique for exact computer simulations in large quantum optical systems. This was applied to non-equilibrium phase-transitions, including the first three-dimensional quantum theory of superfluorescence, which led to the discovery of a new laser: the superfluorescent mode-locked laser, that has been experimentally demonstrated.

The first exact simulation methods for quantum fields were obtained using these techniques, which were tested in quantum soliton squeezing experiments at IBM, MIT and the Max-Planck Institute. Quantum phase-space methods were shown to be applicable to ultra-cold atomic physics, including both integer spin bosons and half-integer spin fermions. This has been applied to the important Bose-Hubbard model and to the first exact computational simulations for the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Quantum collisions of unprecedented numbers of 150,000 atoms in a milllion modes hhave been simulated. His predictions of atom interferometer quantum noise, were tested and confirmed in an SUT experiment having the world's longest coherence time for any BEC interferometer.

In fundamental tests of quantum physics, he obtained the first macroscopic, multi-particle Bell inequality, which was verified experimentally at Oxford. Work on quantitative tests for the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox led to the first experiments testing Einstein's original ideas, at Caltech, as well as the world’s first Bell inequality for continuous variables, and a new quantum uncertainty principle for spin, with applications to improved  interferometry and precision measurement, confirmed experimentally in Barcelona. His current work is on: quantum simulations of entanglement and steering in optomechanics and superconducting quantum circuits, quantum computers, the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum measurements, as well as an analog quantum computer for the early universe, and novel computational algorithms for stochastic equations, stochastic bridges and forward-backward stochastic equations.