Overview

Professor Myungshik Kim is working on the foundations and applications of quantum optics and quantum information processing. He is known for his proposals on the generation, characterization and control of nonclassical quantum states in various physical systems including photons, atoms and mechanical oscillators. After completing his PhD and postdoctoral work at Imperial College, he returned to his native country, Korea where he built up the first quantum optics group that has grown to a considerable research network of quantum physics throughout Korean universities.  He was then awarded a Humboldt fellowship to work at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, where he started working with quantum optics experimentalists.  While he was at Queen’s, he published papers on the quantum optical implementation of information processors and the foundations of quantum physics.  Many contributions by him are related to his vision to bridge our understanding of quantum mechanics in atoms and optics to a wider range of physical systems.  His work on macroscopic superposition and nonlocality has greatly enhanced our understanding in quantum mechanics of a complex physical system.  The quantum-mechanical commutation relation between two canonical variables should be modified at the Planck length scale according to the relativity theory. Myungshik Kim and his co-workers came up with a proposal to test the minimum length scale physics using a nano-mechanical oscillator interacting with a light field. He has been elected to a membership of the Royal Irish Academy for his contribution in theoretical quantum information and quantum optics. He was a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award in 2015. He also received the 2016 Hoam Science Prize.