Events

Scott Aaronson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

I'll give a broad overview of my research over the last decade aimed at understanding the relationship between computational complexity and physics; and in particular, the capabilities and limitations of quantum computers.

Leo Kouwenhoven, Delft University of Technology

Majorana Fermions: Particle Physics on a Chip

Join us for the next Quantum Frontiers Distinguished Lecture Series when Dr. Leo Kouwenhoven will talk about particles that are equal to their anti-particles.

Paul Kwiat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nearly 80 years after Schroedinger described entanglement as the quintessential nonclassical phenomenon, and 50 years after Bell showed the inconsistency of quantum correlations with local realism, the quantum information revolution seeks to use its almost magical properties to enable new feats in information processing. As we shall see, entanglement can now be produced at high rates with exquisite precision, enabling unprecedented tests of nonlocality and such feats as quantum cryptography and teleportation.

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from quantum computing and classical programming languages.

Erik Woodhead, The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain

Quantum key distribution (QKD) can be implemented in both so-called
entanglement-based (EB) and prepare-and-measure (PM) configurations. There is a certain degree of equivalence between EB and PM schemes from the point of view of security analysis that has been heavily exploited in the literature over the last fifteen years or so, where a given PM protocol is reduced to an equivalent EB protocol (following the BBM92 argument) whose security is then proved.

Public lecture by Dr. Krysta Svore, Microsoft Research

In 1981, Richard Feynman proposed a device called a “quantum computer” to take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to achieve computational speed-ups over classical methods. Quantum computing promises to revolutionize how we compute.

Aleksander Kubica, California Institute of Technology

The topological color code and the toric code are two leading candidates for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. In the talk, I will introduce these two models and show their equivalence in d dimensions. I will describe codes with or without boundaries, and explain what insights one gets in the former case by looking at the condensation of anyonic excitations on the boundaries. I will conclude with a recipe of how one can implement fault-tolerantly a logical non-Pauli gate in the toric code in d dimensions.

Mario Berta, California Institute of Technology

The quantum capacity of a memoryless channel is often used as a single figure of merit to characterize its ability to transmit quantum information coherently. The capacity determines the maximal rate at which we can code reliably over asymptotically many uses of the channel. We argue that this asymptotic treatment is insufficient to the point of being irrelevant in the quantum setting where decoherence severely limits our ability to manipulate large quantum systems in the encoder and decoder.

Marzio Pozzuoli, RuggedCom

Abstract:
In 2001 RuggedCom was a fledging startup. A decade later it was bought by Siemens for nearly half a billion dollars. Mr. Pozzuoli, its founder, will discuss its path to success and the role played in that success by the Canadian experience and the strategies outlined in Geoffrey Moore’s iconic book “Crossing the Chasm”.
 
Biography:

Tommaso Calarco, University of Ulm

Quantum technologies are based on the manipulation of individual degrees of freedom of quantum systems with exquisite precision. Achieving this in a real environment requires pushing to the limits the ability to control the dynamics of quantum systems of increasing complexity. Optimal control techniques are known to enable steering the dynamics of few-body systems in order to prepare a desired state or perform a desired unitary transformation.