Future undergraduate students

Ibrahim Nsanzineza, Syracuse University

Nonequilibrium quasiparticles and trapped magnetic flux vortices can significantly impact the performance of superconducting microwave resonant circuits and qubits at millikelvin temperatures. Quasiparticles result in excess loss, reducing resonator quality factors and qubit lifetimes. Vortices trapped near regions of large microwave currents also contribute excess loss. However, vortices located in current-free areascan actually trap quasiparticles and lead to a reduction in the quasiparticle loss.

Ying Dong, Hangzhou Normal University

Thermodynamics has been highly successful, impacting strongly on the natural sciences and enabling the development of technologies that have changed our lives, from fridges to jet planes. Until recently, it was applied to large systems described by the laws of classical physics. However, with modern technologies miniaturizing down to the nanoscale and into the quantum regime, testing the applicability of thermodynamics in this new realm has become an exciting technological challenge.

Nitin Jain, Northwestern University

Quantum-optical frequency conversion (QFC) provides a method, usually via a nonlinear interaction with an optical ‘pump’ beam, to keep the quantum features of an optical ‘signal’ intact. Most QFC experiments
upconvert near-infrared signal photons to those in the visible or near-visible regime due to the availability of highly-efficient detectors that can be operated at high speeds without incurring a severe noise penalty.

 John Martinis, University of California,
Santa Barbara

As microelectronics technology nears the end of exponential growth over time, known as Moore’s law, there is a renewed interest in new computing paradigms. I will discuss recent research at UCSB on superconducting quantum bits, as well as our recent start at Google to build a useful quantum computer to solve machine learning problems.  A recent experiment will be highlighted that extends the lifetime of a qubit state using quantum error correction.

Si-Hui Tan, Singapore University of Technology and Design

We introduce an approach to homomorphic encryption on quantum data.
Homomorphic encryption is a cryptographic scheme that allows
evaluations to be performed on ciphertext without giving the evaluator
access to the secret encryption key. Random operations from an finite
abelian unitary group chosen using an encryption key chosen
uniformly at random perform the encryption, and operations that lie
within the centralizer of the encryption group perform the

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) will open its doors to all members of the community as part of Reunion at the University of Waterloo. Bring the whole family to discover the excitement of quantum mechanics and learn about the world-class research that is happening right here in our community!

Take a look at what's happening at this year's open house!

Fabian Furrer, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation Basic Research Laboratories, Japan

We present a protocol for oblivious-transfer that can be implemented with an optical continuous-variable system, and prove its security in the noisy-storage model. This model assumes that the malicious party has only limited capabilities to store quantum information at one point during the protocol. The security is quantified by a trade-off relation between

Marco Piani, University of Strathclyde, Glascow

Quantum correlations exhibit a variety of non-classical features, which include quantum entanglement, quantum steering, and quantum discord. Such richness and diversity of quantum features calls for meaningful and quantitative approaches to their study. In this talk I will illustrate how it is possible to exploit techniques and insight from convex optimization, especially from semidefinite programming, to provide an operational quantification and interpretation of all the above aspects of the quantumness of correlations.

Britton Plourde, University of Syracuse 

Low-loss resonators formed from lumped circuit elements or distributed transmission lines can be coupled to superconducting qubits. This is the basis for the numerous investigations of circuit-QED over the past decade. In this case, one is primarily interested in the coupling between the qubit and one or a few modes.

Dong Yang, University of Barcelona

From the viewpoint of resource theory, we establish the coherence
theory in an operational way. Namely we introduce the two basic concepts
— “coherence distillation” and “coherence cost” in the coherence
transformation processing and show that the evaluations of them are
reduced to single-letter formula: the coherence distillation is given by
the relative entropy of coherence (or in other words, we give the
relative entropy of coherence its operational interpretation) and the