Current graduate students

Monday, September 25, 2017 11:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Seminar: Aging and Domain Growth in the Spin Glass Copper Manganese

Daniel Tennant - University of Texas, Austin

I will report on dynamical magnetic susceptibility measurements of
both bulk and thin film samples of the spin glass Copper Manganese.
By studying the Thermoremanent Magnetization (TRM) of multi-layer thin
films of various thicknesses, we are able to show the maximum energy
barrier encountered during correlated spin flip transitions is cut off
by the thickness of the film and is independent of temperature. The
distribution of energy barriers is shown to follow from a hierarchical

Tuesday, September 12, 2017 1:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Seminar: Successes and limits in engineering photon pair sources

Evan Meyer-Scott, Universität Paderborn 

I will present a realization of a great photon pair source based on parametric down-conversion, and discuss a not-so-great limit to the performance of photon pair sources in general. The former is a fully fiber-coupled waveguide pair source with 46% raw heralding efficiency, and no optical alignment required. The latter restricts the achievable heralding efficiency, when spectrally filtering the photons to increase the purity.

Behrooz Semnani, PhD candidate, Department of  Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo  

Recent rapid advancements in nanofabrication technologies have widened the realm of possibilities in nanophotonics, nonlinear and sub-wavelength optics. Realizing nonlinear optics in subwavelength scale paves the way for low cost integrated photonics. Ultra-high-Q photonic crystal nanocavities and nanostructured materials are examples of such structures. Those structures offer very small mode volume guaranteeing highly enhanced field intensity.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017 11:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Self-testing QRNG: A lot of randomness for little trust!

Hugo Zbinden, Université de Genève

An approach to quantum random number generation based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination (USD) is developed. We consider a prepare-and-measure protocol, where two non-orthogonal quantum states can be prepared, and a measurement device aims at unambiguously discriminating between them.

Thursday, September 28, 2017 1:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Application of a resource theory for magic states to fault-tolerant quantum computing

Mark Howard & Earl T. Campbell

Motivated by their necessity for most fault-tolerant quantum computation schemes, we formulate a resource theory for magic states. We first show that robustness of magic is a well-behaved magic monotone that operationally quantifies the classical simulation overhead for a Gottesman-Knill type scheme using ancillary magic states. Our framework subsequently finds immediate application in the task of synthesizing non-Clifford gates using magic states.