Guillaume Verdon-Akzam of the Department of Applied Mathematics is defending his thesis:
Probing Quantum Fields: Measurements and Quantum Energy Teleportation
Guillaume is supervised by IQC Associate Achim Kempf.
In this talk, I will solve the problem of the ground state degeneracies of topological orders on open surfaces, using a mechanism called anyon condensation. Along with solving the problem, I will also show that anyon condensation serves as a framework that may unify various aspects of topological orders, such as topological phases, symmetry-protected topological phases, symmetry-enriched topological phases, and so on.
Entanglement-distribution is going to be an important element of any future quantum internet. A number of interesting concepts are being considered at the moment, ranging from fiber-compatible quantum repeaters to long-lived quantum memories that can enable quantum states to be physically shipped or trucked. One of the approaches being considered is to utilise free-space links from satellites to enable fast global coverage.
Experiments designed to prove certain ideas have often ended up showing them to be wrong. Consequently, all physical concepts must be verified experimentally if they are to be accepted as representing laws of nature.
Accordingly, the goals of my talk are:
First, To provide an experimental foundation for the theoretical concepts introduced in the lectures. It is important that students have an opportunity to verify some of the ideas for themselves.
The spin-boson model is an archetype model to study the impact of a thermal reservoir on the coherent dynamics of a two-level quantum particle. When the coupling between qubit and environment crosses a threshold, a transition from coherent to incoherent tunneling between the two qubit eigenstates occurs. At even larger coupling, the dynamics is fully quenched, signaling a strong entanglement of the qubit with the reservoir’s continuum.
Join Fem Phys and Women in Science for an informal conversation with Dr. Milena Grifoni about her career in physics. Dr. Grifoni researches quantum transport in nanoscale systems and quantum dissipation at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Coffee and cookies will be provided. All are welcome.
Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented.
We demonstrate the viability of components of a quantum receiver satellite payload by successfully performing quantum key distribution in an uplink configuration to an airplane. Each component has a clear path to flight for future satellite integration.
In this talk we present new quantum algorithms for Triangle Finding improving its best previously known quantum query complexities for both dense and spare instances. For dense graphs on n vertices, we get a query complexity of O(n^{5/4}) without any of the extra logarithmic factors present in the previous algorithm of Le Gall [FOCS’14]. For sparse graphs we also improve some of the results obtained by Le Gall and Nakajima [ISAAC’15].
Vincent Russo of the Department of Computer Science is defending his thesis:
Extended nonlocal games
Vincent is supervised by IQC faculty members John Watrous and Michele Mosca.