Welcome to the Institute for Quantum Computing
The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) is a scientific research institute at the University of Waterloo. The research happening at IQC harnesses the quantum laws of nature in order to develop powerful new technologies and drive future economies.
What is quantum computing?
Start with our Quantum computing 101 page. It's a quick start guide on quantum computing to help you understand some of the basic principles of quantum mechanics.
Delivering on the quantum promise
The Transformative Quantum Technologies (TQT) program at the University of Waterloo aims to advance the use of quantum mechanics from laboratory curiosity to an impactful device.
News
- Jan. 29, 2020New research vets protocols for affordable, secure communication on optical networks
IQC researchers have developed a new tool for evaluating the security of a broad class of protocols that can take advantage of existing telecom infrastructure to deploy large quantum-secured communication networks in the near-future.
- Dec. 20, 2019New research puts a spin on environmental defects
Magnetic fields are all around us—and even in us—all the time, and they often prove useful in technologies we rely on, like hard drives, MRI scanners and the power plants that provide us electricity.
Measuring small magnetic fields at an atomic scale would allow even more applications in areas of physics, materials science, data storage and biomedical science, including characterizing the magnetic properties of thin-film materials, performing magnetic resonance imaging of single proteins and measuring neural activity at the level of single dendrites.
- Dec. 12, 2019Building a better clock
The best clocks in the world can keep time so accurately that they only lose one second in millions or even billions of years. Yet, researchers are still fervently pursuing ever better clocks. Once a certain threshold of clock accuracy and stability is crossed, it will open up tremendous opportunities to understand the universe and to develop quantum technologies like accelerometers, gravimeters, and communication systems.
Events
- Feb. 24, 2020Quantum interference enables constant-time quantum information processing
Magdalena Stobinska, University of Warsaw
It is an open question how fast information processing can be performed and whether quantum effects can speed up the best existing solutions. Signal extraction, analysis, and compression in diagnostics, astronomy, chemistry, and broadcasting build on the discrete Fourier transform. It is implemented with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm that assumes a periodic input of specific lengths, which rarely holds true. A lesser-known transform, the Kravchuk-Fourier (KT), allows one to operate on finite strings of arbitrary length.
- Feb. 26, 2020Quantum nonlinear optics with Rydberg polaritons
Special Seminar featuring Wenchao Xu, MIT
Photons interact weakly in vacuum. Finding an optical medium that manifests optical nonlinearity at individual photon level is fascinating, as it opens the possibility to build up all-optical quantum devices, and form novel quantum many-body states of lights. In this talk, I will present our approach on engineering a quantum nonlinear medium with Rydberg polaritons; with this, strong mutual interactions between photons are realized.
- Mar. 3, 2020Quantum steampunk: Quantum information meets thermodynamics
Nicole Yunger Halpern, Harvard University
Thermodynamics has shed light on engines, efficiency, and time’s arrow since the Industrial Revolution. But the steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution were large and classical. Much of today’s technology and experiments are small-scale, quantum, far from equilibrium, and processing information. Nineteenth-century thermodynamics requires updating for the 21st century. Guidance has come from the mathematical toolkit of quantum information theory.
