Hari Manoharan
Assistant Professor of Physics
Stanford University
 

Image projection relies on classical wave mechanics and the use of natural
or engineered structures such as lenses or resonant cavities.  Well-known
examples include the bending of light to create mirages in the atmosphere,
and the focusing of sound by whispering galleries.
 

In this talk I will survey our recent observations of ``quantum mirages'' in
focusing devices of order 10 nanometers in size, built by assembling
structures out of individual atoms.  Our experiments rely on atom
manipulation techniques and scanning tunneling microscopy at low
temperatures.  We have directly imaged the spin perturbations due to
isolated magnetic moments on a metal surface.  The detection of this
localized magnetism can then be utilized in a type of teleportation
experiment, in which the spectroscopic signature of an atom is sampled and
projected to a remote location by means of a surrounding sea of electrons
confined in an engineered nanostructure.
 

The quantum mirage thus cast by a single magnetic atom can be coherently
refocused at a distinct point where it is detected as a phantom atom around
which the electronic structure mimics that at the real atom.  Once
materialized, this phantom can interact with real matter in intriguing ways.
We have also been developing a novel communication method based on this
effect.