The Institute for Quantum Computing presented five students with awards for excellent research and outreach activity.
L-R John Donohue, Aimee Gunther, Corey Rae McRae, Robin Kothari and Tomas Jochym-O'Connor
Tomas Jochym-O’Connor was selected for his research on using concatenated quantum codes for universal fault-tolerant quantum communication. Along with Executive Director Raymond Laflamme, Jochym-O’Connor proposed a scheme that uses two different quantum error codes in concatenation establishing a universal set of quantum gates that are robust to errors.
Robin Kothari received the second IQC Achievement Award for his work on simulating Hamiltonian dynamics using ideas from simulations of continuous query model. The new simulation algorithms for sparse Hamiltonians showed an exponential improvement for dependence on the error parameters. This work, done by Kothari with Dominic Berry (MacQuarie University), Andrew Childs, Richard Cleve and Rolando Somma (Los Alamos National Laboratory) was presented at the Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) 2014.
Corey Rae McRae, John Donohue and Aimee Gunther were all awarded the IQC David Johnston Award for Scientific Outreach. Both McRae and Gunther have participated in numerous outreach activities, including many that encourage girls to study science. McRae also leads the IQC Graduate Student Association. Donohue has helped with outreach activities since he began at IQC, including teaching at both the Undergraduate School for Experimental Quantum Information Processing (USEQIP) and the Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS), as well as helping with the Let’s Talk Science program.
We congratulate all the award winners and thank them for their contributions.