Alumni

Anand Natarajan, Caltech

A long-standing puzzle in quantum complexity theory is to understand the power of the class MIP* of multiprover interactive proofs with shared entanglement. This question is closely related to the study of entanglement through non-local games, which dates back to the pioneering work of Bell.

“Quantum physics” has taken its position with “rocket science” in pop culture as a shorthand for frighteningly complicated science. Quantum physics has also taken on a sort of magical connotation in fiction, with features like entanglement, superposition, and tunneling, spurring imagination. But where does the science draw the line? How much is joyful speculation, and how much is disregard for reality? And if it’s always seen as either magical or scary, how does that affect the perception of quantum science?

Supartha Podder, University of Ottawa

In 2011 Harry Buhrman, Serge Fehr, Christian Schaffner and Florian Speelman proposed a new measure of complexity for finite Boolean functions, called "The Garden-hose complexity". This measure can be viewed as a type of distributed space complexity where two players with private inputs compute a Boolean function co-operatively. While its motivation mainly came from the applications to position based quantum cryptography, the playful definition of the model is quite appealing in itself.

Nicole Yunger Halpern, Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics

Join us in QNC 1201 for a Meet and Greet with Nicole Yunger Halpern, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (ITAMP). All are welcome. Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Martin Savage, Institute for Nuclear Theory 

Recently, Silas Beane, David Kaplan, Natalie Klco and I considered the entanglement power of the S-­‐matrix describing low-­‐energy hadronic interactions, and the implications of particular limits. We found that vanishing entanglement power occurs at points of emergent global symmetries, which are seen to be consistent with nature and also recent lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. I will discuss aspects of these results.

Candidate: Guofei Long

Supervisors: David Cory and Guo-Xing Miao

A polar decomposition for quantum channels: insightful tools to navigate through noisy quantum circuits

Arnaud Carignan-Dugas, Institute for Quantum Computing

Inevitably, assessing the overall performance of a quantum computer must rely on characterizing some of its elementary constituents and, from this information, formulate a broader statement concerning more complex constructions thereof.

Journal club presentation:

"Experimental superposition of orders of quantum gates" by Procopio et. al.

(Nature Comms 6, 7913 (2015)

Arash Ahmadi, Institute for Quantum Computing

Quantum computers achieve a speed-up by placing quantum bits (qubits) in superpositions of different states. However, it has recently been appreciated that quantum mechanics also allows one to ‘superimpose different operations’.