quantum computing
pontiff | September 22, 2008I just saw the news that Alexei Kitaev, a pioneer in quantum computing and an incredible physicst/computer scientist, has won a MacArthur "genius" award. Awesome!
Kitaev was my next door neighbor while I was a postdoc at Caltech, and among the many highlights of my short life I count listening to Kitaev's amazing, confounding, brilliant and way over my head ideas. One event in particular I will always remember involved Alexei talking to theoretical computer scientists and, halfway through the talk, pointing out how Majorana fermions were essential to understanding what was going on in that…
pontiff | September 18, 2008The University of Marland's Joint Quantum Institute has won an NSF Physics Frontier Center. $12.5 million over five years. This is the first frontier center devoted exclusively to quantum information science. Congrats to UM! Press release below the fold.
UM Awarded $12.5 Million for Research Center at Frontier of Quantum Physics
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The National Science Foundation has awarded the Joint Quantum Institute $12.5 million over five years to create and operate a Physics Frontier Center at the University of Maryland. The Joint Quantum Institute is a partnership between the…
pontiff | September 16, 2008Anyone who is a U.S. citizen working in the quantum information sciences might be interested in this job announcement from the Aerospace Corporation.
pontiff | September 13, 2008Chris Monroe and David Wineland have an article in Scientific American about ion trap quantum computing.
pontiff | September 11, 2008Robert Clark new chief defence scientist for Australian DSTO, Florida quantum computing conference, standard model quantum computing, and Ray Laflamme is Royal in Canada.
Robert Clark, director of the Australia's largest quantum computing effort, the appointed Chief Defence Scientist for the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (I think "Defence" is the Autralian way of saying "Defense", but I can't really defend the observation, nor can I ever condone the word "Centre.")
Conference SPIE Quantum Information and Computation VII in Orlando, FL. Combine a quantum computing…
pontiff | September 3, 2008What a graduate student at UW discovered when searching for Kitaev's paper on anyons:
pontiff | September 2, 2008Over hyped press releases are a standard for quantum computing research and a stable of what makes me sound like a grumpy old man. Really I'm not that grumpy (really! reall!), but I always forget to post the stuff which isn't over hyped. For example, today I stumbled upon an article about a recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:
While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. "There…
pontiff | September 1, 2008David Wineland, laser cooling god and ion trap quantum computer builder extraordinaire, has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Much awesomeness.
Also winning the medal this year is a name familiar to computer scientists and engineers worldwide, or simply who have spent time at USC: Andrew Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm and cofounder of Qualcom, among other notable achievements.
pontiff | August 28, 2008Quantum error correction and quantum hard drives in four dimension. Part IV of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing:
Prior parts: Part I, Part II, Part III.
Quantum Error Correction
Classical error correction worked by encoding classical information across multiple systems and thus protecting the information better than if it was encoded just locally. Fault-tolerant techniques extend these results to the building of actual robust classical computers. Given that quantum theory seems to be quite different from classical theory, an important question to…
pontiff | August 26, 2008The physics of classical information storage. Why is it that your hard drive works? A modern miracle, I tell you! Part III of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers." Prior parts: Part I, Part II
The Physics of Classical Information Storage
Despite the fact that Shannon and von Neumann showed that, a least in theory, a reliable, fault-tolerant computer could be built out of faulty, probabilistic components, if we look at our classical computing devices it is not obvious that these ideas matter much. I mean really,…
pontiff | August 25, 2008Why is classical computing possible at all? A silly question, but one which never ceases to amaze me. Part II of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers." Prior parts: Part I
Last time I discussed how quantum computing was a lot like classical probabilistic computing. Given this, one can think about a question which seems silly at first: how is it possible to compute when you have a classical probabilistic computer?
Why Is Classical Computation Possible?
Classical computers are both digital and deterministic. But…
pontiff | August 21, 2008Quantum computing is hair-brained, but then again so is classical probabilistic computing. Part I of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers."
Quantum Computing, a Harebrained Idea?
Quantum computing, at first sight, sounds like a hairbrained idea with absolutely no possible possibility of actually working in the real world. The reasons for this are plentiful, at least when you first start learning about quantum computers. Quantum states (aka wave functions) are described by a continuum of values. Uh, oh, that…
pontiff | August 20, 2008QCMC 2008 is being held in Calgary this week. Anyone care to comment on any of the awesome talks or other interesting things they've heard at this fine conference? Anyone?
pontiff | August 12, 2008Interested in quantum error correction (who isn't!) Daniel Lidar informs me that the talks from the QEC07 conference are now all available online.
See such amazing acts as
Tutorials
Dave Bacon [ppt][video]
Daniel Gottesman [ppt][video]
Raymond Laflamme [pdf][video]
Lorenza Viola [pdf][video]
Keynote
David Cory [ppt][video] (no audio)
John Preskill [pdf][video]
Peter Shor [ppt][video]
David Wineland [ppt][video]
Invited
Robert Alicki [pdf][…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.
An email about a summer school in Australia:
Dear Colleagues
Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times...
We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics
which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres
The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes
and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…
pontiff | August 6, 2008Hot off the presses!
In an amazing breakthrough, which this press release has no room to describe in any real detail, scientists at research university BigU have made tremendous progress in the field of quantum computing. The results mean that quantum computers are one step closer to replacing your laptop computer
Quantum computers work by some mechanism that we don't have the time to understand. But we are sure our researchers will explain it to you, but you won't understand anyways, so why ask them? It's definitely got something to do with multiple universes and bits that are both zero…
pontiff | August 5, 2008Summary of what's new and happening on the arXivs according to voters on SciRate.
0807.4935 (15 scites) "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard.
I blogged about this article here.
0807.4753 (9 scites) "Counterexamples to the maximal p-norm multiplicativity conjecture for all p > 1" by Patrick Hayden and Andreas Winter
One of the largest one questions in quantum information theory is the additivity of the Holevo capacity of quantum channels. The Holevo capacity of a quantum channel is the rate at which you can send classical information down this…
pontiff | August 5, 2008MIT has won a three million dollar NSF grant for a interdisciplinary graduate training program for quantum information science. The program will be called iQuISE and will be lead by Isaac Chuang along with Seth Lloyd and Jeffery Shapiro. Now the real question is how the heck do you pronounce iQuISE? "I.Qs?" "I Kiss?" "I.Q. eyes?"
Oh, and also we get the answer to how interdisciplinary is quantum information science:
MIT academic departments and divisions that will have faculty and students participating in iQuISE include Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics, Mechanical…
pontiff | August 4, 2008Yep, it's paper dance time. This one is less of a dance and more of a shuffle:
arXiv:0808.0174 (scirate)
Title: Simon's Algorithm, Clebsch-Gordan Sieves, and Hidden Symmetries of Multiple Squares
Author: D. Bacon
Abstract: The first quantum algorithm to offer an exponential speedup (in the query complexity setting) over classical algorithms was Simon's algorithm for identifying a hidden exclusive-or mask. Here we observe how part of Simon's algorithm can be interpreted as a Clebsch-Gordan transform. Inspired by this we show how Clebsch-Gordan transforms can be used to efficiently find a…
pontiff | August 1, 2008For those of you who aren't afraid of "uberconnected web 2.0"-ing, I've set up a quantum computing room on friendfeed. "For those with nothing better to do than contemplate the one true theory of computation."