quantum computing
pontiff | January 16, 2008Sam, after asking me for $100 dollars out of nowhere, points me to quantalk.org, a new slick website for, err, talking about quantum information. Seems to be a closed registration right now, so no talking by plebes is allowed, but it is slick! I hope it goes far, considering how little success I've had in my own endeavors into Science 2.0.
Interestingly, and spurring Sam's comment, right now it says they are offering one hundred euro for reviews right now (Update: Simon Benjamin, one of the operators, points that you need to make sure and email them before embarking on such an adventure…
pontiff | January 16, 2008Graphene quantum dots as qubits, Quantum Zeno effect, and the APS March meeting.
A group in Zurich has made quantum dots in graphene and demonstrated Coulomb blockade opening up yet another material of promise for quantum dot qubits. Journal article here.
Lev Vaidman has an itneresting News and Views on some recent work related to the quantum Zeno effect and in particular on this recent Physical Review A article.
The March meeting of the APS now has its program online. The best way I can figure out of finding sessions sponsered by GQI is going to this page and searching the text of that…
pontiff | January 10, 2008I knew the Perimeter Institute was big, but enough to bump Kitchener to the second highest concentration of scientists in municipalities of its size in Canada?
(And yes I'm kidding that the PI is all that there is in Waterloo :) )
pontiff | December 22, 2007Superexchange in optical lattices, factoring 15 in a linear optics quantum computer, quantum plagarism peaceful resolution, silicon and gallium arsinide quantum computers, and quantum mumbo jumbo in support of the ideas popularly known as God.
Superexchange demonstrated in an optical lattice by Immanuel Bloch's group in Germany.
Quantum leaps: Brisbane Times and UQ News Online report on Andrew White factoring 15 with a linear optics quantum computer. The preprint for this paper is arXiv:0705.1398. I didn't check, but I bet they got 15 equals 3 times 5.
A resolution to the quantum…
pontiff | December 19, 2007You know, QEC07 participant, you're supposed to be watching the talks and not reading this blog! But if you are reading this blog, you might as well not just lurk and instead comment. That's right its a QEC 07 open thread.
To start things off, would anyone care to comment on Robert Alicki's final slide during his talk yesterday? For those not attending QEC 07, Alicki and coworkers have been looking at the properties of two and four dimensional Kitaev phases. For the four dimensional phase, it seems that Alicki could show that they serve as good quantum memories, but he claimed that it was…
pontiff | December 18, 2007So simultaneous with QEC07, the conference I'm attending, is the QIP 2008. Anyone at QIP see any interesting talks that they'd be willing to comment on? Come on, don't be shy (or post anonymously :) )
pontiff | December 18, 2007Today I watched a talk on skepticism about quantum error correction. Now I don't agree with the particular criticism's leveled, but I'm all for people airing their criticisms and, if the majority view is correct, the majority should be able to answer the questions raised. But this isn't what interested me today. What interested me today was thinking about the following question: when has it been true that a curmudgeon, which I use in the most positive since of the word, been on the winning side? When has it been that a single or very small group of radicals who opposes a majority whose…
pontiff | December 17, 2007The grades are all done, and the students are gone, and now I'm conferencing. (That sentence should be sung to the tune of "Busted") After a mere hour and a half delay at the airport I arrived last night at USC for QEC07.
Day one is a half day of tutorial talks and then a half day of talks. I've posted slides of my talk here: "Topological Codes and Subsystem Codes and Why We Should Care About Them..." Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to post about in the next few days as I listen to the latest and greatest from the world of quantum error correction.
So far the highlight of the…
pontiff | December 5, 2007Congrats to Daniel Lidar, Seth Lloyd, and Barbara Terhal, for becoming the first three APS fellows selected through the APS topical group Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI). Citations below the fold.
Citations from the aps website:
Lidar, Daniel
University of Soutern California
Citation: For his contributions to the theory of decoherence control of open quantum systems for quantum information processing, especially the decoherence free subspace method.
Nominated by: Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI)
Lloyd, Seth
Massachusettes Institute of Technology…
pontiff | December 4, 2007SQuInT program and deadline, Rush Limbaugh on quantum cosmology, and the parallel worlds of Hugh Everett's son
The 2008 SQuInT conference deadline for registration is fast approaching, December 12. The program is now available online as well. Looks like a good lineup.
Rush Limbaugh talks about quantum cosmology. He is completely wrong that man doesn't affect his environment, less wrong that we are insignificant in the universe, and you can imagine that since the paper he is talking about has been filtered through at least one other media organization prior to reaching his hands, the…
pontiff | November 29, 2007One of the funniest abstracts to a paper on the arxiv in many moons appeared yesterday, authored by Carlos Mochon:
arXiv:0711.4114
Title: Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
Authors: Carlos Mochon
"God does not play dice. He flips coins instead." And though for some reason He has denied us quantum bit commitment. And though for some reason he has even denied us strong coin flipping. He has, in His infinite mercy, granted us quantum weak coin flipping so that we too may flip coins. Instructions for the flipping of coins are contained herein. But be warned! Only those who…
pontiff | November 27, 2007My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
I greatly enjoyed reading N. David Mermin's last two Reference Frame columns on factoring and quantum computing ("What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring?", Physics Today, April 2007, page 8 and "Some curious facts about quantum factoring", Physics Today, October 2007, page 10.) However as the proud one-time owner of the California license plate "QUBIT" (which I had…
pontiff | November 21, 2007Postdocs, APS GQI quantum newsletter, Quantum computing in Waikiki, quantum chicanery, quantum foods.
Postdocs at NIST: National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateships at Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory
The fall newsletter for the APS Topical Group of Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation is available. Included is a report on a recent quantum computing conference in Iran, as well as statements from the people crazy enough to run the topical group officer positions. Wait, I'm one of those crazies? Doh.…
pontiff | November 19, 2007Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave's machine:
What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process?
Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments (proving that a quantum computer is quantum computing is something which many experimentalists have struggled over, for far smaller systems than D-wave's system.) But there is a much simpler experiment which I haven't seen answered in any of the press on D-wave, and which, for the life of me, I…
pontiff | November 19, 2007So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment:
Mohammad Amin (D-Wave)
Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits
Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three…
pontiff | November 13, 2007Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole
Pawel Wocjan writes that he has positions open for graduate students in quantum computing:
Ph.D. Position in Quantum Computing & Quantum Information with Dr. Pawel Wocjan, School of EECS, University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, in sunny Florida
I am accepting applications for a Ph.D. position in Quantum Computing and Quantum Information starting in Fall 2008. You can learn more about my research and the research in quantum information science at UCF by…
pontiff | November 12, 2007D-wave systems, whose paracomputer, err, I mean quantum-maybe computer, which sparked quite a bit of controversy earlier this year, is back in the news. This time D-wave is at the big superconducting conference (SC07) being held in Reno, Nevada and is demonstrating a 28-qubit quantum-maybe computer. Paint me an ivory tower skeptic, but I don't think their system will work as they expect it to. Of course, this being, D-wave, the news article makes for some entertaining reading.
First up we have this beautiful quote from Geordie Rose, D-Wave founder and CTO,
"We have been collaborating…
pontiff | November 6, 2007SQuInT 2008. Quantum postdocs. Christianity as a laser. Toshiba opens lab with a quantum bent.
SQuInT 2008, my favorite conference, has been announced and will be Feb 14-17 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Speakers include
Eddie Farhi (MIT)
Patrick Hayden (McGill University)
Alex Kuzmich [unconfirmed] (Georgia Tech)
Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano (University of Pavia)
Irina Novikova (College of William & Mary)
Ray Simmonds (NIST Boulder)
along with tutorials
Steven van Enk (University of Oregon) "Entanglement and Verification"
John Martinis (University of Californian, Santa Barbara) "…
pontiff | November 5, 2007Oftentimes I've been asked what the purpose of this blog is. As if everything in life must have a purpose:pfft, I say! But because an answer is required, what I usually answer is that the purpose of my blog is to slow down my fellow researchers. I mean sheesh, the people in quantum computing are the modern polyglots of science, speaking physics, computer science, and mathematics with ease. And they're universally a brainy crowd. So what better purpose can this blog serve that to slow these readers down by offering them great opportunities to surf the intertubes and procrastinate.
Along…