People can usually stand me only a few years, so that's why I worked in so many places:
-
I did my undergraduate studies in Theoretical Physics at the
University of Utrecht.
My master thesis was about massless particles with spin>2.
As far as we know, such particles don't exist.
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Then I started doing my PhD in a different department.
Not for the last time I worked in a group that was mainly experimental.
At the time the department was called Atomic and Surface Physics, now it's
Atom Optics.
-
At some point, though, my supervisor Gerard Nienhuis moved to the
University of Leiden
(that's how we Dutch spell Leyden), and so did I.
My thesis with the title "Light as a Thermodynamic Force" gives a general theory of
so-called light-induced kinetic effects in gases.
-
In 1993 I moved to Germany, to do a postdoc at the
Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics
in Garching.
My old group's home page doesn't seem to exist anymore, unfortunately,
but we, the Theory Group, had a great time. In fact, I met my wife,
Jian Zhang.
Workwise, the emphasis was on calculating the effects of intense laser
fields (intensities of roughly 10^8-10^11 W/cm^2 and above) on atoms.
- During that same time I was also employed (for one year) at the laser institute
in
Heraklion, Crete. I actually only spent a few weeks there but they were
awesome weeks (well, most of the time was spent touring Crete).
- From Garching it's just a two-hours drive to Innsbruck in
Austria. Mind you, if you have a car with a German license plate you
are more likely to get a parking ticket. But on the positive side, one
can not only ski but do theoretical physics as well. In particular,
that's where I started to work on Quantum Information.
I actually lived in a cabin near a ski lift in Mutters, at some point chosen as the most beautiful village in Tyrol.
- The brilliant idea occurred to Jian and me to move to the USA.
Now Southern California sounded like a nice place, and indeed, it was.
I stayed three years at
Caltech, enjoying the sun, the nice campus, and the good food in the many Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Thai restaurants.
- Then I spent 6 years at Bell Labs, which used to be an
amazing place before Alcatel took over and destroyed physics research. The weather is not as good as in California, nor is the
food. Well, New York does actually have some good restaurants. I used to have a link to a Dutch restaurant, but to no one's surprise, it (I mean the restaurant, not just the link) has disappeared.
- And just to make the first sentence true, I recently moved again, to the University of Oregon.
To conclude, let me say that from 1996 on I've been working in the field of Quantum Information.
Since that's still my favorite subject I'll even give a link to my papers on that subject:
quant-ph, not that anyone is interested.