Seminar

Special Seminar featuring Wenchao Xu, MIT

Photons interact weakly in vacuum. Finding an optical medium that manifests optical nonlinearity at individual photon level is fascinating, as it opens the possibility to build up all-optical quantum devices, and form novel quantum many-body states of lights.

Nicole Yunger Halpern, Harvard University

Thermodynamics has shed light on engines, efficiency, and time’s arrow since the Industrial Revolution. But the steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution were large and classical. Much of today’s technology and experiments are small-scale, quantum, far from equilibrium, and processing information.

A Monochromatic Atom-wide Electron Probe for Nanoscale Materials Excitations

Maureen Joel Lagos
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada

Wednesday, October 2, 2019
2:30 p.m.
C2-361 (Reading Room)

Abstract: 

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.

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!

Michael Chen

Designing control pulses to generate desired unitary evolution subjugated to experimental constraints (e.g., decoherence time, bandwidth) is a common task for quantum platforms, these type of problems are often addressed in the context of quantum optimal control. Parallel Automatic Differentiation Quantum Optimal Control (PADQOC) is an open-source, Python based general quantum optimal control solver built on top of Tensorflow 2. It is designed to be fast, extensible and useful for controlling general quantum systems.

Academic Writing Workshop #3

Elisabeth van Stam (UW Writing and Communication Centre)

Join us for our ongoing writing series on clarity in scientific writing. During this session, we will cover theory and practical examples related to active vs. passive voice, verb tense in scientific writing, parallel structure and more.

Exponentially faster antisymmetrization

Maria Kieferova

Two-photon and Three-photon Parametric Interactions in Superconducting Microwave Circuits

Sandbo Chang

Optimising gates with a hybrid quantum-classical scheme

Hemant Katiyar