Events

Frank Wilhelm-Mauch, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany

Readout plays a central role in most quantum information protocols, notably in fault tolerance. While the readout of supercondcuting qubits operating in the microwave regime has reached exquisite performance using Josephson Parametric Amplifiers, these ask for large technological overhead that is difficult to scale down. We will show how a recently introduced microwave photon counter, the Josephson Photomultiplier JPM can be used for qubit readout with much less overhead and even elementary data processing on chip.

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

Christoph Simon, University of Calgary

Quantum optical systems are well suited for pushing the boundaries of quantum physics. Two big goals in this context are the creation of entanglement over long distances and the observation of quantum effects on macroscopic scales. I will describe various theoretical and some experimental work in these directions.

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.

 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.

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.

The Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) Summer School, hosted by IQC, equips graduate students and young postdoctoral fellows with a strong foundation in quantum communication, particularly quantum cryptography.

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.

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.

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