Prof. Jeff Kimble passed away on Monday. What a loss.
We all often wondered what made Jeff Kimble the legend he is, and I think we all agree that above all, Jeff Kimble was a Pioneer.
Jeff once told me: "If someone in the world can do what I do here as well as we do, it is my time to switch to the next thing - it is our role here in Caltech to lead, to do new things, to be first."
And being first he did, in so many things - from optical squeezing, to teleportation, to nonclassical states of light, to cavity-QED in the optical domain, as well as so many theoretical contributions all over the field, even LIGO.
But if I try to pin-point one specific contribution, one example jumps into my mind, one that is often neglected, hidden behind the mass and impact of his later works, and one that alone was enough, in my view, to grant him a Nobel award.
This was in fact one of his first scientific demonstrations, in 1977, when he was still with Leo Mandel in Texas.
It is the first observation of antibunching in resonance fluorescence - namely showing that individual atoms emitted light in discrete units that cannot be divided (PRL 39, 691, 1977) .
This was in fact the first direct experimental proof for the existence of photons - the particles of light (the photoelectric effect is often wrongly conceived as this proof, but it actually establishes the discrete nature of the electrons, not the photons). Bearing in mind that the quantization of light in 1900 by Max Planck was in fact the birth of the entire field of quantum mechanics, this demonstration is undoubtedly a historical cornerstone.
Exactly 30 years later, as a postdoc at Jeff's Quantum Optics Group, I was fortunate to repeat that same experiment, only in a new platform (attaining a much cleaner result) - single atoms interacting with fiber-coupled photons, using chip-based microresonators (Science 319, 1062, 2008).
When I showed Jeff my results, he went into his office for a couple of hours, and then came back, all excited, saying: "I now understand it - it is exactly like (Howard) Carmichael described it - the linear optical system cancels out, and whatever we see at the output is actually emitted directly by the atom. So basically it is antibunching in resonance fluorescence again!". He then slammed the table and joked: "there you go - this is how I started, and this is how I'll finish...".
That was in 2007, and needless to say, Jef Kimble was very far from finishing his contribution to the scientific community.
It is many scientists' view that Jeff should have been the third name on the 2012 Nobel prize, together with the esteemed Dave Wineland and Serge Haroche, for opening the door to quantum interactions between single photons and single atoms.
Rest in peace, Jeff, the entire scientific world will miss you sorely.
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