The amazing climbing ability of geckos has attracted the interest of philosophers and scientists alike for centuries. However, only in the past few years has progress been made in understanding the mechanism behind this ability, which relies on submicrometre keratin hairs covering the soles of geckos. Each hair produces a miniscule force approximately 10(-7) N (due to van der Waals and/or capillary interactions) but millions of hairs acting together create a formidable adhesion of approximately 10 N x cm(-2): sufficient to keep geckos firmly on their feet, even when upside down on a glass ceiling. It is very tempting to create a new type of adhesive by mimicking the gecko mechanism. Here we report on a prototype of such 'gecko tape' made by microfabrication of dense arrays of flexible plastic pillars, the geometry of which is optimized to ensure their collective adhesion. Our approach shows a way to manufacture self-cleaning, re-attachable dry adhesives, although problems related to their durability and mass production are yet to be resolved.

The novel experimental realization of three-level optical quantum systems is presented. We use the polarization state of biphotons to generate a specific sequence of states that are used in the extended version of four-state QKD protocol quantum key distribution protocol. We experimentally verify the orthogonality of the basic states and demonstrate the ability to easily switch between them. The tomography procedure is employed to reconstruct the density matrices of generated states.

We discuss a procedure of measurement followed by the reproduction of the quantum state of a three-level optical system -a frequency-and spatially degenerate two-photon field. The method of statistical estimation of the quantum state based on solving the likelihood equation and analyzing the statistical properties of the obtained estimates is developed. Using the root approach of estimating quantum states, the initial two-photon state vector is reproduced from the measured fourth moments in the field . The developed approach applied to quantum states reconstruction is based on the amplitudes of mutually complementary processes. Classical algorithm of statistical estimation based on the Fisher information matrix is generalized to the case of quantum systems obeying Bohr's complementarity principle. It has been experimentally proved that biphoton-qutrit states can be reconstructed with the fidelity of 0.995-0.999 and higher.

A natural atom placed into a cavity with time-dependent parameters can be parametrically excited due to interaction with the quantized photon mode. One of the channels for this process is the dynamical Lamb effect, induced by a nonadiabatic modulation of the atomic-level Lamb shift. However, in experiments with natural atoms it is quite difficult to isolate this effect from other mechanisms of atom excitation. We point out that a transmission line cavity coupled with a superconducting qubit (an artificial macroscopic atom) provides a unique platform for observation of the dynamical Lamb effect. A key idea is to exploit a dynamically tunable qubit-resonator coupling, which was implemented quite recently. By varying the coupling nonadiabatically, it is possible to parametrically excite a qubit through a nonadiabatic modulation of the Lamb shift, even if the cavity was initially empty. The dynamics of such a coupled system is studied within the Rabi model with a time-dependent coupling constant and beyond the rotating-wave approximation. An efficient method to increase the effect through the periodic and nonadiabatic switching of the qubit-resonator coupling energy is proposed.

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