Tobias Kippenberg
NOMIS Insight Lecture
Wednesday,
October 14, 2026
16:30 – 17:05
The Quest for Ultralow Dissipation: From Self-Organized Light to Collective Quantum Drums
All physical systems inevitably lose energy: A plucked guitar string eventually falls silent, a swinging pendulum comes to rest, and even light trapped in a tiny glass structure slowly fades away. This process of dissipation appears simple but raises a profound question: What ultimately determines how slowly energy can be lost?
Tobias Kippenberg’s NOMIS-supported project, The Quest for Ultralow Dissipation, explores how light in microscopic glass resonators self-organizes into stable pulses — enabling frequency combs at the
heart of today’s most precise clocks — and how cooling and coupling tiny mechanical “drums” into the quantum regime can yield sensors of unprecedented sensitivity. His research probes how minimizing energy loss can paradoxically give rise to new forms of order and push quantum behavior to macroscopic scales.
