Events

IQC presents the first in a series of lectures from members of industry in quantum computing and quantum information. Jonathan Hodges, VP of engineering for Diamond Nanotechnologies, will be speaking about his research as well as the day-to-day realities of working in industry. You can learn more about the company here: http://www.diamondnanotechnologies.com/

Omar Fawzi, McGill University

The goal of two-party cryptography is to enable Alice and Bob to solve tasks in cooperation even if they do not trust each other. Examples of such tasks include bit commitment, coin flipping and oblivious transfer. Unfortunately, it has been shown that even using quantum communication, none of these tasks can be implemented when the adversary is completely general.

David Elkouss, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Xiaodong Xu, The University of Washington

Electronic valleys are extrema of Bloch energy bands in momentum space. Having multiple valleys gives the electron states pseudospin degrees of freedom in addition to their real spin. In this talk, I will discuss our experimental progress on the investigation of spins and pseudospins using atomically thin semiconductors, which are either single or bilayer group VI transition metal dichalcogenides.

Sahel Ashhab, Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, Qatar Foundation

Cavity QED in the ultrastrong-coupling regime & Landau-Zaner-Stückelberg interfereometry

Sevag Gharibian, University of California, Berkeley

The study of ground spaces of local Hamiltonians is a fundamental task
in condensed matter physics. In terms of computational complexity
theory, a common focus in this area has been to estimate a given
Hamiltonian’s ground state energy. However, from a physics
perspective, it is often more relevant to understand the structure of
the ground space itself. In this paper, we pursue the latter direction
by introducing the notion of “ground state connectivity” of local

Ivette Fuentes, The University of Nottingham

Quantum technologies are widely expected to bring about many key technological advances this century. Quantum metrology and quantum information have been so far successfully applied in the design of devices that outperform their classical counterparts by exploiting quantum properties. Impressively, the quantum era is now reaching relativistic regimes. Table-top experiments demonstrate relativistic effects in quantum fields and long range quantum experiments will soon reach regimes where relativity kicks in.

Laura Mancinska, Centre for Quantum Technologies, Singapore

Quantum entanglement is known to provide a strong advantage in many two-party distributed tasks. We investigate the question of how much entanglement is needed to reach optimal performance. For the first time we show that there exists a purely classical scenario for which no finite amount of entanglement suffices. To this end we introduce a simple two-party nonlocal game $H$, inspired by Hardy's paradox. In our game each player has only two possible questions and can provide bit strings of any finite length as answer.

Carl A. Miller, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Recently Yaoyun Shi and I gave the first proof of security for robust exponential quantum randomness expansion. This talk will be an overview of the problem and a discussion of the techniques used in our proof.

The lecturer will be Phil Kaye, a 2006 IQC graduate currently working at the Government of Canada. This lecture will be more informal and will focus on Phil's career path, how his PhD prepared him for his current position, and the challenges of working outside of academia.

For futher questions, please contact Corey Rae, IQC GSA President, crmcrae@uwaterloo.ca