quantum computing
pontiff | June 30, 2009Summer doesn't officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it's all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found...
The Innsbruck group has a new paper out on a very cool way to shuffle ions in a trap: arXiv:0906.5335
The info processor points to a review of power laws in finance/economics
Via the one honest man a strangely mesmerizing history of yield curve spreads:
It looks like a group has finally gotten…
pontiff | June 29, 2009Is Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Information the first quantum institute to have a twitter feed?
Update: @WaterlooIQC tells me that no they probably aren't the first. That title probably goes to iqoqi.
pontiff | June 29, 2009The Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (the palindromic CQIQC) recently established the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications. And the first winner is (opening the envelope, wondering whether he will find a dead or live cat inside)....Professor Nicolas Gisin from the Université de Genève:
Nicolas Gisin, Professor of Physics at the Université de Genève, is a true visionary and a leader among his peers. He was among the first to recognize the importance of Bell's pioneering work, and has throughout his career…
pontiff | June 24, 2009The latest issue of the newsletter of the APS topical group on Quantum Information, the Quantum Times, is now available. Of particular note is the long article summarizing the Workshop on Quantum Information Science.
pontiff | June 15, 2009Dan Reed has a brief note up about a new group at Microsoft the extreme computing group (XCG) which includes among its subject areas quantum computing:
XCG was formed in June 2009 with the goal of developing radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group's research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.
Also in the news here. Microsoft, of course, has long had a toe in…
pontiff | June 15, 2009I wasn't at Quantum Information Science Workshop in Vienna, VA, but I heard that the topic of quantum computing "going black" came up at least a few times. One speaker mentioned during his talk that several of his former graduate students were now in "the black hole" of secret U.S. research programs and another expressed, during the open session, that the field is not yet mature enough to be conducting secret research.
Quantum computing is an odd field when it comes to secrecy. Since one (not the only) reason that quantum computers are interesting is that they break the most popular public…
pontiff | June 12, 2009The "International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)" now has a web site with information on the conference Oct 5-6 in Boulder, CO:
Dynamical decoupling techniques show the potential to dramatically suppress errors in quantum information and quantum control systems. To date, research in this area has been scattered between magnetic resonance experimentalists and quantum information theorists. This workshop aims to foster new relationships between experimental and theoretical researchers in an effort to speed technical developments and to promote the adoption of dynamical decoupling…
pontiff | June 9, 2009David Wineland runs a world class lab at NIST Boulder which has been at the forefront of ion trap quantum computing. William Phillips is a Nobel prizing winning physicist who also does quantum computing at NIST, this time at NIST Gaithersburg. To say that these are two top researchers in quantum computing, is a massive understatement. Both of the groups have produced their ground breaking work with the support of numerous alphabet soup government agencies throughout the years. Now comes word, via a Nature news article that IARPA, the intelligence community's version of DARPA, has decided…
pontiff | May 28, 2009Recently I've been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that's not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well...I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there...which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to…
pontiff | May 26, 2009Via the man of many B's, dates for QIP 2010 have been set. QIP 2010 will be in Zurich from January 18 to January 22. Website here.
Hmm, Switzerland in January for skiing?
pontiff | May 19, 2009Okay, well not quite a music video(!), but my coauthor Steve Flammia has done a videoabstract for our paper (on quantiki at http://www.quantiki.org/video_abstracts/09050901):
pontiff | May 15, 2009Via the CCC Blog, an announcement concerning an NSF funded opportunity for new PhDs in Computer Science, CIFellows (http://cifellows.org):
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to announce an opportunity for new PhD graduates in computer science and closely related fields to obtain one-to-two year positions at host organizations including universities, industrial research laboratories, and other organizations that advance the field of computing and its positive impact on society.…
pontiff | May 13, 2009Martin Plenio writes in with a link to a new site he created with Daniel Burgarth Videoabstracts (Joe got an email too):
I am writing to you to bring to your attention some new tool that we (Daniel Burgarth and myself) have developed that has the aim of making science papers just a little more accessible. Its called Videoabstracts and consists of 'homemade' videos in which an author of the paper explains the key point of the paper in front of a whiteboard. The videos should not be longer than 5 minutes to force people to get to the point efficiently. We feel that these 5 minutes clarify the…
pontiff | May 11, 2009Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide audience of physicists and serve as a sieve for what a good broad physicist should know about what is currently going on in physics.
Today, a highlight I wrote about two recent PRLs has appeared: Too entangled to quantum compute one-way. This paper highlights two recent papers on entanglement in one-…
pontiff | May 8, 2009Yes, it's a slow dance:
Through the hourglass I saw you, in time you slipped away
When the mirror crashed I called you, and turned to hear you say
If only for today I am adiabatic
Take my pulsed gates away
arXiv:0905.0901, "Adiabatic Gate Teleportation" by Dave Bacon and Steve Flammia
(As seen on arXiview)
pontiff | May 7, 2009After watching Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
* The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I'm heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
Looking at the list of my papers, I'm struck by many things. First of all I'm amazed by how tightly I've…
pontiff | May 2, 2009Quantum ghosts, dynamical decoupling, why a diamond is forever in quantum computing, transversal press, quantum phrases I can't grok, and quantum jumping.
Quantum ghosts: here and here. These articles describe the work reported in Laing, Rudolph, and O'Brien. "Experimental Quantum Process Discrimination." Phys. Rev. Lett., 102, 160502 (2009) arXiv:0801.3831. The idea is to discriminate "non-orthogonal" quantum processes via the use of entanglement, which is cool. (I'm a bit surprised that this classic paper is not referenced.)
Optimized dynamical decoupling performed in ions at NIST.…
pontiff | April 23, 2009
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pontiff | April 21, 2009In Vienna, Virginia on April 23-25th a workshop is being held in response to a report, "A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science" issued by the United States National Science and Technology Council. While this workshop looks, from the outside, like any other typical quantum computing workshop, this is a bit deceiving, as from what I understand this workshop is supposed to provide the impetus for a report arguing for a major spending for quantum information science in the United States, especially from the National Science Foundation. The Quantum Pontiff, unfortunately, is stuck…
pontiff | April 16, 2009Michael Biercuk sends me a note about an upcoming workshop on dynamic decoupling. He's trying to get a gauge of the interest in such a workshop:
Upcoming International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)
Expected Date: October, 2009
Location: Boulder, CO
By Invitation Only
Interested participants please contact Michael J. Biercuk,
biercuk at boulder.nist.gov
Those interested should shoot Michael an email.