The Member Physical Society Topical Group on Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation offers an annual award for student papers in experimental research sponsored by the Institute of Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.
The first award was presented at the 2006 APS Meeting in Baltimore and the second at IQC on the 22nd of October 2007. Frank Koppens from Delft University of Technology received the award.
Frank works on quantum dots and presented his recent work at the IQC Colloquium. The ability to control the quantum state of a single electron spin in a quantum dot is at the heart of recent developments towards a scalable spin-based quantum computer. In his talk, he discussed the realization of both magnetically and electrically induced single electron spin rotations in a gate-defined GaAs double quantum dot. With his colleagues he has coherently controlled the quantum state of the electron spin by applying short bursts of an on-chip generated oscillating magnetic field, and observe about eight Rabi oscillations of the spin state during a microsecond burst.