quantum computing
pontiff | February 18, 2009I know you're not paying attention the talk. So why not go to the FriendFeed room located here. Once sQuinT starts, I hope to live blog there and could use some help (Thursday evening.)
pontiff | February 18, 2009Charles passes along that Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a few good quantum people:
JOB POSITION IN QUANTUM PHYSICS IN ARLINGTON, VA - BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON, INC.
As you may already know from interacting with us at review meetings and conferences, our team at Booz Allen Hamilton provides scientific and technical expertise to a variety of government agencies. As consultants, we work with our clients to develop new research programs, monitor ongoing research, and to help transition technologies to other government agencies and industry.
Currently, we are looking to expand our physics team…
pontiff | February 17, 2009Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:
Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.
pontiff | February 16, 2009A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:
Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon's otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty…
pontiff | February 14, 2009In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names.
The presser:
Nine Leading Researchers Join Stephen Hawking as Distinguished Research Chairs at Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada
WATERLOO, Ontario, Canada, February 9, 2009 - Dr. Neil Turok, Director of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), is pleased to announce the appointment of nine more outstanding international scientists to the positions of PI Distinguished Research Chairs.
The new Chairs…
pontiff | February 13, 2009Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):
Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
URL: http://www.aero.org/support/laft
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
"fault" underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. "Fault tolerance" is the term given…
pontiff | February 11, 2009Fame and fortune could be yours. Tell your supervisor to nominate you:
Once again, GQI will award two "Best Student Paper" prizes at the APS March Meeting (2009): one for theory and one for experiment. The awards, each consisting of a $500 cash prize, are sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, respectively. All undergraduate and graduate students who are both first author and presenters of an oral or poster presentation are eligible.
To be registered for the competition, a brief…
pontiff | February 5, 2009I've never made it to Benasque, and am always profoundly jealous of those who have gone:
Dear Colleague,
We are pleased to inform you that following a very successful editions of Benasque 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007, we are organizing another workshop of the similar type in June 2009. This is to invite you to apply using the electronic form that you can find on the website specified below. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible and not later than the end of March 2009. The number of participants at the Benasque Centre at any given time is limited to about 50. We will do our best…
pontiff | February 5, 2009For subscribers to Physics World, an article I wrote The Race to Build a Quantum Computer has appeared in the February edition. Unfortunately unless you have a subscription you'll have to pay to read the article...or better yet, pick up a copy of the magazine!
pontiff | February 4, 2009Some upcoming talks for those in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor (so many A's!):
Feb 5, 5pm, University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Studies Seminars: The Symmetry Conjecture
Feb 6, 4:00 pm, University of New Mexico Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer
Feb 9, 4pm, University of Michigan Seminar: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer.
pontiff | February 3, 2009Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting between ions in different traps.
The original paper in the January 23rd issue of Science: Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits, S. Olmschenk, D. N. Matsukevich, P. Maunz, D. Hayes, L.-M. Duan, and C. Monroe. Official press release here.
New York Times article. My favorite quote:
The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information.
"We need to work on that…
pontiff | February 3, 2009Sir Tobias Osborne of the Quantum Boolean Functions has made the plunge and is trying out open notebook science: Tobias J. Osborne's Research Notes.
Which reminded me of some dream software I've been thinking of writing (oh Time you Devil---why could you not expand to fit in all I want to create and do in this life!)
The basic idea is as follows. Blogs are great for a few reasons. One is they provide a journal system and date stamping system. Second they allow for commenting and this commenting can be done after some basic user authentication. But they are, it seems to me, not ideal…
pontiff | January 19, 2009From a crazy model to a concrete question: is there a nice mathematical structure hidden here?
Once upon a time I wrote a crazy paper (arXiv:quant-ph/03091189) on quantum computation in the presence of closed time-like curves. In this model, one identifies two types of quantum systems: those that are "chronology respecting" and those that traverse "closed time-like curves." These two types of quantum systems can interact amongst themselves and also between each other. A typical setup is as in the figure at the right, where n chronology respecting qubits interact with l closed time-like qubits…
pontiff | January 16, 2009The Perimeter Scholars Institute is a Masters level course designed to prepare students for cutting-edge research in theoretical physics. It looks pretty cool with some outstanding lecturers. The application deadline is February 1. All accepted students will be fully supported. Details below the fold.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is a leading international research centre whose goal is to catalyze breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical world. PI strives to create a lively and dynamic research atmosphere where many approaches to fundamental questions, both…
pontiff | January 16, 2009The last day of QIP in Santa Fe. Also note that Joe has posted some nice notes on additivity on his blog: part I and part II. Oh, and QIP next year will be in Zurich, and QIP the year after next will be in Singapore.
computing, conference, quantum
Lluis Masanes, "Towards device-independent security in QKD"
Paper: arXiv:0807.2158. I cam in late, so was a bit lost. But basically Lluis talked about secret key distillation under weaker assumptions than just assuming quantum theory. It seems that one an do secret key distillation from accessing the correlations that violate Bell inequalities…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Stuff learned while at QIP.
A solution to the more cranky P versus NP problem: simply send those who claim P=NP the papers claiming P does not equal NP, and vice versa
I did not know that the cell phone ring tone which is hard for older people to hear was first used by restraunts to keep away kids. That's pretty evil.
When the question says he used to work in the earth sciences as a preface at a quantum computing conference, you should update your prior about the person being homeless
I now understand arXiv:0810.3695 better and particularly am interested in the trick of using an…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Sorry to those who talked in the afternoon yesterday: I ran off to listen to Michael Nielsen talk at the Santa Fe Institute.
Charles Marcus, "Holding quantum information in electron spins"
Charlie gave a talk about the state of quantum computing in solid state quantum dot systems. Things Charlie talked about:
T1 times of single electron spins of 1 second from Mark Kastner's group:
arXiv:0707.1656. Those are long, and it would be awesome to have those for real working devices!
Delft's work on single electron spin manipulations: "Driven coherent oscillations of a single electron spin in a…
pontiff | January 14, 2009A full day today, after a nice break yesterday (went for a run: yeah for altitude making me winded nearly instantly!)
Andrew Childs, "Universal computation by quantum walk
Andrew Childs talked about a subject whose origin can be pretty much tracked back to Feynman in the 1980s. In particular Feynman constructed a model of computing in which you have a time independent Hamiltonian. In today's language this is equivalent to showing that there is a quantum random walk which is universal for quantum computing (though Andrew mentioned that this was a model for classical computing using a quantum…
pontiff | January 13, 2009A half day at QIP.
The reason I'm having a hard time keeping away this morning:
Avinatan Hassidim, "Multi-prover interactive proofs with communicating provers"
Paper arXiv:0806.3982. Avinatan described work he performed with Michael Ben-Or and Haran Pilpel on multiprover interactive proofs in which the prover/verifier communication is quantum and the provers are allowed to communicate classically. One would expect, at first glance, that this model is very weak. For example if we augment the provers with entanglement they can then communicate and this model is equivalent to a single prover…
pontiff | January 12, 2009Having some glitches publishing, so am trying to split up the posts.
Continuing on the quantum information theory beat:
John Smolin (speaker) and Graeme Smith, "Can non-private channels transmit quantum information?"
John began by explaining the stages of grief and how this relates to the demolishing of the two additivity questions (described above.) He also showed a picture of a certain interesting way to achieve computer privacy...similar to those found here:
The work John talked about is described in arXiv:0810.0276. The private channel capacity is the capacity of a quantum channel to…