Events

IQC Special Seminar - Olivier Morin, MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE OF QUANTUM OPTICS

Building a quantum internet requires to develop computing machines but also to connect them at various scales, e.g. via optical fibres. Although it is not yet known which physical platforms are suitable for this challenge, there is a consensus to say that light-matter interface will play an important role. ...

Math/CS Seminar Featuring Sebastian Zur (CWI, Amsterdam)

While quantum walk frameworks make it easy to design quantum algorithms, as evidenced by their wide application across domains,
the major drawback is that they can achieve at most a quadratic speedup over the best classical algorithm. 

IQC Special Seminar, Jahan Claes, Yale Department of Applied Physics

Large-scale quantum computers will require error correction in order to reliably perform computations. However, the hardware overhead for error correction remains dauntingly large, with each logical qubit potentially requiring thousands of physical qubits for reliable operation.

Brad Ramshaw

Abstract: Strange metals have linear-in-temperature (T-linear) down to low temperature. Strange metals are found in many families of correlated electron materials, leading to the conjecture that a universal bound - the "Planckian" bound - limits the scattering rate of electrons to a value set by fundamental constants. If the Planckian bound exists, it would provide a natural explanation for why a host of seemingly disparate systems, including high-temperature superconductors and twisted bilayer graphene, all have T-linear resistivity. Perhaps more dramatically, T-linear resistivity suggests that electron-electron interactions are so strong that conventional concepts such as quasiparticles and Boltzmann transport do not apply in strange metals. I will present our work on the cuprate Nd-LSCO and the 5-layer superconducting nickelate that shows that conventional quasiparticle transport is alive and well, even in the strange metal regime where the Planckian bound is saturated. This suggests that we may not need to abandon the quasiparticle picture entirely, but that we need to better understand the source of scattering in these materials. 

Landau-Zener tunneling: from weak to strong environment coupling

CS/Math Seminar - Jiahui Liu (UT Austin)

Copy-protection is the task of encoding a program into a quantum state to prevent illegal duplications. A line of recent works studied copy-protection schemes under ``1 -> 2 attacks'': the adversary receiving one program copy can not produce two valid copies. However, under most circumstances, vendors need to sell more than one copy of a program and still ensure that no duplicates can be generated. In this work, we initiate the study of collusion resistant copy-protection in the plain model. Our results are twofold:

IQC Special Seminar - Jeremy Young - JILA, University of Colorado

One of the major goals in the field of quantum science is to utilize the properties of quantum mechanics for applications in quantum computation, quantum simulation, and quantum sensing. In order to address this goal, a variety of different many-body quantum platforms have been developed. Many of these quantum platforms exhibit long-range interactions, particularly power-law interactions, including Rydberg atoms, polar molecules, and trapped ions, among others. This gives rise to a natural question: how does the long-range nature of these interactions affect the resulting quantum evolution? 
 

IQC will be hosting a training session open to current IQC staff, faculty and research assistant professors.

Bystander Intervention can help create a sense of belonging, care, and respect within our communities. The Sexual Violence Prevention & Response Office (SVPRO) is conducting training across the UWaterloo campus to provide skills and resources to help people intervene when they see a harmful, or potentially harmful, situation.  

Debanjan Chowdhury: The good, the bad and the strange: Unconventional metallic behaviour in the vicinity of Mott insulators

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed remarkable experimental breakthroughs in uncovering the intriguing properties of correlated metals in the vicinity of Mott transitions. Describing these phenomena theoretically remains an open challenge. This talk will focus on three recent examples of puzzling electronic behavior near Mott insulating phases and address the various conundrums. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the microscopic origin of an unconventional T-linear resistivity with Planckian scattering in a quasi-two-dimensional “good” metal with long mean-free path, consisting of highly conducting metallic and Mott insulating layers, respectively. In the second part, I will address the origin of a low-temperature “bad” metallic behavior in the vicinity of a continuous bandwidth-tuned metal-insulator transition in a moiré semiconductor. I will end by presenting some new theoretical insights into the experimental observation of an anomalous particle-hole continuum and overdamped plasmon in the density response of cuprate “strange” metals. 

IQC Special Seminar - Bradley Hauer, National Institute of Standards and Technology

In the current paradigm of quantum cavity optomechanics, the relatively weak parametric coupling between an electromagnetic cavity and a mechanical resonator is mediated by an external pump. While this strong cavity drive acts to enhance the optomechanical interaction, it obscures its intrinsic nonlinearity, restricting these systems to bilinear operations on Gaussian states. By increasing this coupling such that it dominates the decoherence rates of the system, one could instead use the fundamental optomechanical nonlinearity to prepare the mechanical resonator into complex, non-Gaussian states...