IQC Achievement Award winner Bowen Yang sat down with us to discuss his PhD research in quantum materials, the opportunities he’s received while at IQC, and his recommendations for students interested in learning and gaining more experience with quantum.
IQC Achievement Award winner Xi Dai sat down with us to discuss his PhD research with superconducting circuits, the challenges he overcame, and his plans for the future following graduation.
IQC Achievement Award winner Shayan Majidy sat down with us to discuss his current and future research on noncommuting conserved quantities, the award, and his advice for current and aspiring students interested in quantum information.
Kimia Mohammadi's master’s thesis investigates the design of an 8-inch transceiver telescope capable of both transmitting and receiving quantum signals at 785 nm, as well as classical communications at 980 nm and 1550 nm, with higher efficiency than similar commercial options. This telescope is aimed to be one of the quantum ground stations that will test Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols and other communication schemes with the Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat), once it is launched in 2024.
EvolutionQ, a leading quantum-safe cybersecurity company founded and led by Executive Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing Norbert Lütkenhaus, and IQC faculty member Michele Mosca, recently announced their latest partnership with SandboxAQ, an enterprise Saas company. This partnership was formed in relation to evolutionQ’s Series A funding and its recent grant of $7 million in funding, which will help organizations like SandboxAQ prepare for quantum computers.
Noncommuting conserved quantities have recently launched a subfield of quantum thermodynamics. In conventional thermodynamics, a system of interest and an environment exchange quantities—energy, particles, electric charge, etc.—that are globally conserved and are represented by Hermitian operators. These operators were implicitly assumed to commute with each other, until a few years ago. Freeing the operators to fail to commute has enabled many theoretical discoveries—about reference frames, entropy production, resource-theory models, etc. Little work has bridged these results from abstract theory to experimental reality. This work provides a methodology for building this bridge systematically: we present a prescription for constructing Hamiltonians that conserve noncommuting quantities globally while transporting the quantities locally. The Hamiltonians can couple arbitrarily many subsystems together and can be integrable or nonintegrable. Our Hamiltonians may be realized physically with superconducting qudits, with ultracold atoms, and with trapped ions.
Landau Zener (LZ) transition is a paradigm to describe a wide range of physical phenomenon. Dissipation is inevitable in realistic devices and can affect the LZ transition probabilities. I will describe how we can model the effect of the environment depending on whether it is weakly or strongly coupled to the system. I will also present our experimental results where we found evidence of crossover from weak to strong coupling limit.
Structured waves and spin-orbit coupled beams have become an indispensable probe in both light and matter-wave optics [1-2], for neutron specifically, showing distinct scattering dynamics for some samples [3-4]. We present a method of generating neutron orbital angular momentum (OAM) states utilizing 3He neutron spin filters along with four specifically oriented triangular coils and magnetic field shielding. These states are verified via their spin-dependent intensity profiles [5]. The period and OAM number of these spin-orbit states can be altered dynamically via the magnetic field strength within the coils and the total number of coils to tailor the neutron beam towards a particular application or specific material [6].
The Office of Research at the University of Waterloo will be hosting a webinar to provide practical information and answer questions related to the new NSERC Alliance funding options that support Canada’s National Quantum Strategy.
Device-independent cryptography connects the foundational topic of Bell inequalities to the operational task of achieving secure cryptography. With significant progress being made in Bell test experiments, various avenues for further developing device-independent cryptography have been opened. I will give an overview of some background and recent developments in the field, as well as some research questions that should be of interest going forward.