Colloquium

Colloquium featuring Lindsay LeBlanc University of Alberta - Zoom

The ability to store and manipulate quantum information encoded in electromagnetic (often optical) signals represents one of the key tasks for quantum communications and computation schemes.

Colloquium featuring Isaac Chuang - MIT

The three main branches of quantum algorithms, for simulation, search, and factoring, hold historically disparate origins. Today, we can now understand and appreciate all of these as being instances of the quantum singular value transformation algorithm of Gilyen, Su, Low, and Weibe. This unified framework, and the surprisingly universal role of single-qubit dynamics, open doors to many new quantum algorithms and opportunities for quantum advantage.

The recording is now available online.

IQC Colloquium - Matthew Hastings, Microsoft Research

Interference is an essential part of quantum mechanics. However, an important class of Hamiltonians considered are those with "no sign problem", where all off-diagonal matrix elements of the Hamiltonian are non-negative. This means that the ground state wave function can be chosen to have all amplitudes real and positive.

Colloquium featuring Carl Alexander Miller - QuICS and NIST

How can two parties carry out a fair coin flip across a noiseless quantum channel? In 2007, Carlos Mochon proved a tantalizing result: he showed that fair quantum coin flipping is possible in principle, but he used a protocol that required a huge (exponential) number of communication rounds. In the twelve years since, despite some continued deep theoretical work on the problem, no improvements to the efficiency of Mochon's protocol have been made.