Current students

Dimensionality-driven orthorhombic MoTe₂ at room temperature.

Joey Zhong

Colloquium featuring Heejeong Jeong - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Optical precursors are transient electromagnetic wave packets propagating precisely at the speed of light in vacuum through a dispersive and absorptive dielectric. Even though its existence was conjectured by Sommerfeld and Brillouin 100 years ago, the detection seemed to be impossible due to its exceedingly small amplitude and femtosecond time scale in ordinary linear dispersive media. 

Christopher Pugh of the Department of Physics and Astronomy is presenting his thesis:

Free Space Quantum Key Distribution to Moving Platforms

Christopher is supervised by IQC faculty member Thomas Jennewein.

Paulina Corona Ugalde of the Department of Physics and Astronomy is defending her thesis:

Experimental Prospects for Detecting the Quantum Nature of Spacetime

Paulina is supervised by IQC associate Robert Mann

Characterizing drift qubits

Timothy Proctor, Sandia National Laboratories

It is essential to benchmark and characterize real-world qubits in order to understand whether they are of sufficient quality for quantum information tasks, and if they are not, so that they can be debugged. Many techniques are designed for qubits that stay constant in time, but in reality almost all qubits suffer from some form of time-dependence.

Efficient quantum memory in naturally trapped Rare-Earth ions

Mahmood Sabooni, IQC

The ability to map, store quantum states of light (e. g. single photon) to matter and later retrieve is one of the important building blocks of quantum information processing. Such a device is called a quantum memory for light.

Complexity of quantum impurity models

Sergey Bravyi, IBM Research

I will discuss classical and quantum algorithms for simulation of quantum impurity models. Such models describe a bath of free fermions coupled to a small interacting subsystem called an impurity. Hamiltonians of this form were famously studied by Anderson, Kondo, Wilson and others in 1960s.

Constraint Propagation Games

Zhengfeng Ji, University of Technology, Sydney

Constraint propagation games are simple extended nonlocal games that are motivated by the propagation checking of quantum computation and have found powerful applications in the study of quantum proof systems recently. In this talk, we will introduce their definitions and basic properties, demonstrate their uses in larger games as building blocks, and illustrate the method that turns them into nonlocal games.

Scaling up single-atom spin qubits in silicon

Andrea Morello, Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology, University of New South Wales

The modern information era is built on silicon nanoelectronic devices. The future quantum information era might be built on silicon too, if we succeed in controlling the interactions between individual spins hosted in silicon nanostructures.

Spins in silicon constitute excellent solid-state qubits, because of the weak spin-orbit coupling and the possibility to remove nuclear spins from the environment through 28Si isotopic enrichment.

Sequential measurements, disturbance and property testing

Aram Harrow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We describe two procedures which, given access to one copy of a quantum state and a sequence of two-outcome measurements, can distinguish between the case that at least one of the measurements accepts the state with high probability, and the case that all of the measurements have low probability of acceptance.