Current graduate students

Thursday, March 8, 2018 12:00 pm - 12:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Transformative Quantum Technologies (TQT) Lunch and Learn

Why a listing in London could make sense for Canadian early stage technology companies

Featured Speaker: Sarah Baker, Head of North American Strategic Engagement, London Stock Exchange Group

London is the most international stock market in the world, with more international companies listed than any other stock exchange.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018 10:00 am - 10:00 am EST (GMT -05:00)

Correlated dissipation: inhibiting atomic decay via cooperative dynamics

Ana Asenjo Garcia - California Institute of Technology

Dissipation is a pervasive problem in many areas of physics. In quantum optics, losses curb our ability to realize controlled and efficient interactions between photons and atoms, which are essential for many technologies ranging from quantum information processing to metrology. Spontaneous emission - in which photons are first absorbed by atoms and then re-scattered into undesired channels - imposes a fundamental limit in the fidelities of many quantum applications, such as quantum memories and gates.

Thursday, March 22, 2018 1:30 pm - 1:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Quantum acoustics with superconducting qubits

Yiwen Chu - Yale University

The ability to engineer and manipulate different types of quantum mechanical objects allows us to take advantage of their unique properties and create useful hybrid technologies. Thus far, complex quantum states and exquisite quantum control have been demonstrated in systems ranging from trapped ions to superconducting resonators. Recently, there have been many efforts to extend these demonstrations to the motion of complex, macroscopic objects.

Monday, February 26, 2018 11:00 am - 11:00 am EST (GMT -05:00)

Quantum optimization using superconducting qubits: A new platform

Rakesh Tiwari, McGill University

Quantum phenomena have the potential to speed up the solution of hard optimization problems. For example quantum annealing, based on the quantum tunnelling effect, has recently been shown to scale exponentially better with system size as compared with classical simulated annealing. However, current realizations of quantum annealers with superconducting qubits face two major challenges. First, the connectivity between the qubits is limited, excluding many optimization problems from a direct implementation.

Friday, March 23, 2018 11:45 am - 11:45 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

RAC1 Journal Club/Seminar Series

Sangil Kwon: Phase in Superfluids and Spontaneously Broken Gauge Symmetry

It is often said that superfluids (including superconductors) can be described by a macroscopic quantum wavefunction and their phase transition can be understood based on the concept of spontaneously broken gauge symmetry. This statement is not, however, trivial at all. In this seminar, I will discuss some conceptual problems that stem from applying the concept of spontaneously broken gauge symmetry to superfluids.

Monday, February 26, 2018 12:00 pm - 12:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Critical noise parameters for assessment of quantum error correction

Pavithran Iyer, Université de Sherbrooke

Arbitrary precision quantum control of qubit systems appears to be unobtainable due to environmental influences that manifest themselves as errors in a quantum algorithm. Errors modelled by the probabilistic application of Pauli operators during the computation are convenient for analytical proofs and classical simulation but the level of accuracy of such a model depends on the quantumness of the error source.

Thursday, February 22, 2018 4:00 pm - 4:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Single-Photon Imaging: What Physics and Computation can do Together in Imaging Science

Feihu Xu, University of Science and Technology of China

Every time you take a photo, photons strike different parts of your image sensor in different quantities. In daytime, your sensor detects more than a billion photons, which are more than 1000 photons per pixel for a basic one-megapixel camera. Can you take a photo with one photon per pixel? I will address how to perform accurate imaging at a light level of one photon per pixel.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 10:30 am - 10:30 am EST (GMT -05:00)

Synergetic Study of Electrical Transport using Graphene and SrTiO3

Jeongmin Park - Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics (CINAP), Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University

The combination of two-dimensional (2D) materials and functional oxide has been attracted in electrical transport study. Many researchers expected synergetic performance from this interesting structure. And the field effect transistor (FET) scheme was widely used to study it. Here, we successfully demonstrated graphene FET device which is fabricated on top of SrTiO3 (STO).

Tuesday, March 27, 2018 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Simulating Cosmological Models in Optical Lattices

Gerard Valentí Rojas - The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain

The laws of quantum mechanics have helped scientists to unravel the behaviour of nature at its most fundamental scales. However, quantum phenomena are often difficult to understand and simulations have historically provided a useful framework for their study. Nevertheless, when dealing with large quantum systems or real-time dynamics, the computational cost of numerical simulations can become unfeasible.