Events

IQC Alum Lecture Series: Ben Criger, Cambridge Quantum

The possibility for quantum computers to outcompete classical high-performance computers at their own game looms tantalizingly on the horizon. The main obstacle to performing large-scale computations remains the cascade of small inaccuracies on individual components throughout large quantum circuits. Since the 1990s, techniques have been invented for suppressing these errors, principally within academia.

Communication networks are an essential part of our world today, used in transactions from banking to education, global business exchanges to defence. What happens when our private information is no longer private? Powerful quantum computers will have the ability to crack the encryption of public keys that we currently use to secure our data, putting our privacy at risk.

Detector Imperfections in QKD

Very often, in theory, device and implementation imperfections are assumed to be ideal to make the theory simpler. However, before we can practically use these devices, these assumptions must either be removed or justified. I will talk about some techniques to rigorously deal with imperfect detectors within the context of QKD.

IQC Alum Lecture Series: Galit Anikeeva, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) alum Galit Anikeeva will talk about her research since IQC, at Stanford, MIT, and beyond - at first focusing on quantum error correction, and then most recently on tentative connections between chaos and Hamiltonian simulation. She will also highlight how lessons from her time at IQC have shaped her path through undergraduate research and into graduate school, especially welcoming questions from younger students. 

Ojas Parekh, Sandia National Laboratories

Quantum Max Cut (QMC) is a QMA-hard instance of 2-Local Hamiltonian (2-LH) that is closely related to the well-studied antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model (AFHM). Finding maximal energy states of QMC is equivalent to finding ground states of AFHM; however, the approximability of the former is related to the classical Max Cut problem.

RAC Journal Club Series featuring Bhaskaran Muralidharan, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Join us for Quantum Today, where we sit down with researchers from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) to talk about their work, its impact and where their research may lead.

Developments in device-independent cryptography

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.

IQC Alum Lecture Series: Urbasi Sinha, Raman Research Institute

In this talk, we cover different interesting aspects of experimental photonic quantum information processing that have been recently explored at the Quantum Information and Computing lab at RRI, Bangalore. We discuss our experiment on the first loophole free violation of the Leggett Garg Inequalities (LGI) as well as the Wigner form of the same (WLGI)[1].

Julien LAURAT (ENS Paris)

Quantum interconnects are central to the scale up of quantum information architectures. In this endeavour, I will first report on the implementation of a highly-efficient quantum memory based on a large ensemble of cold atoms. I will discuss how we implemented such efficient memories over the recent years, from typical efficiency values of about 30% in 2015 to 70% in 2018 and close to 90% in this recent work. Moreover, we used this platform to demonstrate highly efficient and reversible entanglement transfer into and out of two quantum memories. I will also present the realization of a faithful quantum-bit-encoding converter that relies on a teleportation process based on hybrid entanglement of light between CV and DV optical qubits.