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Przemyslaw Bienias

Quantum Research Scientist at AWS. Former postdoctoral researcher.

Research ScientistAlumni
Profile photo of Bienias Przemyslaw

Contact Information

Email:
bienias@umd.edu
Office:

2126

Additional Info

Research Profile:
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About

Research Areas: 
Polar molecules, magnetic atoms, and other dipolar systems
Strongly interacting photons
Topological matter in AMO systems
Driven-dissipative systems
Alkaline-earth atoms

Bio: Where are they now?: 
Quantum Research Scientist at AWS. Former postdoctoral researcher.

Research Groups

Recent Publications

Recent News

  • Technical graphic composed of two white dots on a blue-green background. The left dot shows a gradient from black to light yellow. A dotted line forms a semicircle connecting the two black dots on the edge of the white dot. The right white dot is filled with a hexagonal grid. The hexagons git smaller the further they are from the center of the dot. Each vertex of the hexagons is a colored dot with the ones near a larger grey dot being purple and the rest fading to yellow the further away they are.

    Enhancing Simulations of Curved Space with Qubits

    January 18, 2022

    One of the mind-bending ideas that physicists and mathematicians have come up with is that space itself—not just objects in space—can be curved. When space curves (as happens dramatically near a black hole), sizes and directions defy normal intuition. Understanding curved spaces is important to expanding our knowledge of the universe, but it is fiendishly difficult to study curved spaces in a lab setting (even using simulations). A previous collaboration between researchers at JQI explored using labyrinthine circuits made of superconducting resonators to simulate the physics of certain curved spaces. In particular, the team looked at hyperbolic lattices that represent spaces—called negatively curved spaces—that have more space than can fit in our everyday “flat” space. Our three-dimensional world doesn’t even have enough space for a two-dimensional negatively curved space. Now, in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters on Jan. 3, 2022, the same collaboration between the groups of JQI Fellows Alicia Kollár and Alexey Gorshkov, who is also Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, expands the potential applications of the technique to include simulating more intricate physics. They’ve laid a theoretical framework for adding qubits—the basic building blocks of quantum computers—to serve as matter in a curved space made of a circuit full of flowing microwaves. Specifically, they considered the addition of qubits that change between two quantum states when they absorb or release a microwave photon—an individual quantum particle of the microwaves that course through the circuit. 

  • Two (Photons) is Company, Three’s a Crowd

    April 26, 2021

    Photons—the quantum particles of light—normally don’t have any sense of personal space. A laser crams tons of photons into a tight beam, and they couldn’t care less that they are packed on top of each other. Two beams can even pass through each other without noticing. This is all well and good when making an extravagant laser light show or using a laser level to hang a picture frame straight, but for researchers looking to develop quantum technologies that require precise control over just one or two photons, this lack of interaction often makes life difficult. Now, a group of UMD researchers has come together to create tailored interactions between photons in an experiment where, at least for photons, two’s company but three’s a crowd. The technique builds on many previous experiments that use atoms as intermediaries to form connections between photons that are akin to the bonds between protons, electrons and other kinds of matter. These interactions, along with the ability to control them, promises new opportunities for researchers to study the physics of exotic interactions and develop light-based quantum technologies.

  • Blue spheres representing atoms cause light, represented by red squiggly lines to scatter. A laser beam is represented in the background.

    Scientists See Train of Photons in a New Light

    August 4, 2020

    Flashlight beams don’t clash together like lightsabers because individual units of light—photons—generally don’t interact with each other. Two beams don’t even flicker when they cross paths. But by using matter as an intermediary, scientists have unlocked a rich world of photon interactions. In these early days of exploring the resulting possibilities, researchers are tackling topics like producing indistinguishable single photons and investigating how even just three photons form into basic molecules of light. The ability to harness these exotic behaviors of light is expected to lead to advances in areas such as quantum computing and precision measurement. In a paper recently published in Physical Review Research, JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov, JQI postdoctoral researcher Przemyslaw Bienias, and their colleagues describe an experiment that investigates how to extract a train of single photons from a laser packed with many photons.  In the experiment, the researchers examined how photons in a laser beam can interact through atomic intermediaries so that most photons are scattered out of the beam and only a single photon is transmitted at a time. They also developed an improved model that makes better predictions for more intense levels of light than previous research focused on. The new results reveal details about the work to be done to conquer the complexities of interacting photons.