Extreme sensing — from your senses to quantum limits

Two 90-min lectures · one spaced week of exercises · one tutorial. The lectures tease from this hub; the exercises pull you back to it; you build your own understanding here.

The spine — one idea, six anchors

Everything hangs off six anchor concepts, revisited at increasing depth. The hub is the centre; lecture and exercises are the two channels into it.

Sensing I — how do ordinary sensors fail, and how do we quantify it?

1 · Trade-off triangle 2 · Noise & Allan 3 · SQL 1/√N

Sensing II — what can quantum resources improve, and what do they make fragile?

4 · Quantum ladder 5 · Back-action & squeezing 6 · Transduction

↑ lecture teases · ↓ exercises pull — the hub is the persistent centre ↑

core (live, deep) · micro-core (a short live worked example, then web-depth) · bridge (exercise pulling from the page)

The spaced week — three 30-min sessions

Do these in three separate sittings across the week — not one cram. Tick them off; your progress is saved on this device. Each session ends with one logbook entry — print or copy the template.

Session (space them out)	Anchors	Exercise — do & log

JavaScript is off, so the tick-box calendar isn't drawn. The three spaced sittings (≈2 anchors per 30-min session, one logbook entry each): Session 1 (early week) — anchors 1 & 2 (design task + noise-trace task); Session 2 (mid week) — anchors 3 & 4 (coin-flip / photon-counting + pick-the-rung); Session 3 (late week) — anchors 5 & 6 (squeezing-band task + diagnose a broken transduction chain); then an end-of-week 90-min tutorial to discuss logbooks.

The anchors

A student who missed the lecture can still enter the spine here. All six anchors are live — five interactive, one static.

Anchor 1 · Trade-off triangle — sensitivity vs dynamic range vs bandwidth; you cannot max all three.

Anchor 2 · Noise & Allan deviation — mean → PSD → Allan; when more averaging stops helping.

Anchor 3 · The standard quantum limit — why precision ∝ 1/√N, the classical counting floor.

Anchor 4 · The quantum ladder — coherent → squeezed → entangled → QEC.

Anchor 5 · Back-action & squeezing — squeeze one quadrature, pay in the other.

Anchor 6 · Transduction — photons ↔ phonons, spin ↔ motion.

Definitions, equations and references for all six live in the Reference Library.

The other rooms

The workshop is the hands-on room; here are the others.

▶ Lecture — the story → the two interludes as one arc, from humanoid to quantum sensing.

▶ Reference Library → definitions, equations, boundaries & references — one card per anchor.

▶ Go broader → curated videos, papers & textbooks per anchor (optional depth).

▶ The logbook → the five-field entry, a worked example, and a printable template — one entry per session.