Events

Canada’s future:  Tech Commercialization and Crossing the Chasm - 'How do we enable the Innovators?'

Angela Mondou, author, entrepreneur and founder of ICE Leadership Inc., a consulting company helping technology and aerospace and defence scale-ups, is a former air force captain, tech marketing executive and CEO,  whose unconventional career has taken her from worldwide military operations to top-ranked high-tech companies including Research in Motion, the creators of BlackBerry™.  With her

Kun Fang, University of Cambridge

As a more general form of quantum superposition, quantum coherence represents one of the most fundamental features that set the difference of quantum mechanics from the classical realm. In this talk, we will use the tool of semidefinite programming to study two fundamental tasks relating quantum coherence, i.e., coherence distillation of quantum states and coherence cost of quantum processes.

Joel Wallman, University of Waterloo

Significant global efforts are currently underway to build quantum computers. The two main goals for near-term quantum computers are finding and solving interesting problems in the presence of noise and developing techniques to mitigate errors. In this talk, I will outline and motivate an abstraction layer needed to reliably operate quantum computers under realistic noise models, namely, a cycle consisting of all the primitive gates applied to a quantum computer within a specified time period.

Junichiro Kono, Rice University

Recent experiments have demonstrated that light and matter can mix together to an extreme degree, and previously uncharted regimes of light-matter interactions are currently being explored in a variety of settings, where new phenomena emerge through the breakdown of the rotating wave approximation [1]. This talk will summarize a series of experiments we have performed in such regimes.

Peter Schumacher, Saarland University

We present an efficient gap-independent cooling scheme for a quantum annealer that benefits from finite temperatures.

John Wright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

In the area of quantum state learning, one is given a small number of "samples" of a quantum state, and the goal is use them to determine a feature of the state. Examples include learning the entire state ("quantum state tomography"), determining whether it equals a target state ("quantum state certification"), or estimating its von Neumann entropy. These are problems which are not only of theoretical interest, but are also commonly used in current-day implementation and verification of quantum technologies.

An introduction to making scientific figures with Illustrator and Blender

Special guest speaker: Christopher Gutierrez, University of British Columbia

Scientific research can be a slow and laborious process. The absolutely final step in the process is to then communicate your exciting scientific findings to other scientists both in and outside of your field. Yet it is often at this final step where the least amount of time is spent.

Speaker: Doug Beynon

Abstract:

Tobias Fritz, Perimeter Institute

Similar to how commutative algebra studies rings and their ideals, the protagonists of real algebra are ordered rings. Their interplay between algebra and geometry is studied in terms of Positivstellen- stze, real analogs of the Nullstellensatz, which go back to Artin's solution of Hilbert's 17th problem. I will describe some of the state of the art in this eld, and then introduce a new Positivstellensatz which unies and generalizes several of the existing ones.

Three Results in Quantum Physics

Master's Candidate: Jaron Huq