Events

The international Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) Summer School is a five-day program focused on theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum communication with a focus on quantum cryptography. Established in 2008, QKD occurs every other year and was last held in 2017.

Aurélia Chenu - Donostia International Physics Center

Quantum thermodynamics is an emerging field with potential application to nanoscience. At the quantum level, work becomes a stochastic variable, and the work probability distribution is key to characterize a working medium. Complex quantum systems can boost the performance of quantum machines, but their characterization is challenging due to a complexity exponentially scaling with the system size.

Sam Ferracin, University of Warwick

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing devices promise to have computing capabilities that exceed those of modern supercomputers. As these devices will be afflicted by non-negligible levels of noise, understanding if their outputs can be trusted is a task of timely importance.

Academic Writing Workshop #4

Elisabeth van Stam (UW Writing and Communication Centre)

Join us for our last session in the clarity in scientific writing series. During this session, we will apply the principles you have learned in order to improve the clarity and cohesion of your own writing. Please bring a sample of your writing (1-2 pages, double spaced), and be prepared to read, discuss, and revise!

Seminar featuring Brynle Barrett - iXblue

High-sensitivity, low-drift inertial sensors based on cold-atom interferometry are poised to revolutionize the field of inertial guidance and navigation, yet many challenges still remain. For instance, due to the slow data rate of atom interferometers and the large bias drifts of mechanical accelerometers, hybridization schemes will almost certainly be necessary [1].

Sadegh Raeisi - Department of Physics, Sharif University of Technology

Non-equilibrium dynamics induced by rapid changes of external parameters is relevant for a wide range of scenarios across many domains of physics. For waves in spatially periodic systems, quenches will alter the bandstructure and generate new excitations. In the case of topological bandstructures, defect modes at boundaries can be generated or destroyed when quenching through a topological phase transition.

Topological Insulator-Superconductor Heterostructures and Devices

Lin Li, IQC

 A 3D topological insulator (TI) has a fully gapped insulating bulk state but a conducting surface. Such conducting “surface” states are formed with helical Dirac fermions, with spin-momentum strictly locked by spin-orbital coupling. When coupled to a conventional s-wave superconductor (S), the surface state behaves just like the desired p-wave superconductor. It has been predicted that Majorana zero-modes obeying non-Abelian statistics can appear in such a system.

Resources Needed for Entangling Two Qubits through an Intermediate Mesoscopic System

Maryam Mirkamali

Lee Liu, Harvard University

For over two decades, ultracold neutral atoms have served as workhorses in experimental quantum science. Their indistinguishability, available internal states featuring long coherence times or large dipole moments, low configuration entropy, and ability to be manipulated with electromagnetic fields make them ideally suited for applications ranging across quantum many-body physics and quantum simulation, quantum networks, quantum information processing, precision measurements, and the study of cold collisions.

Mishkat Bhattacharya, Rochester Institute of Technology

We are in the middle of a revolution in phononics, where it seems useful and possible to control phonons on the mesoscale as we have photons in the last few decades. In this talk I will describe our theoretical proposal and its experimental demonstration (in the group of A.N. Vamivakas)) regarding a phonon laser made of the center-of-mass oscillations of a nanoparticle trapped in an optical tweezer.