Seminar

Friday, August 18, 2017 1:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

IQC Special Seminar: Quantum Physics for Babies

Chris Ferrie: Quantum Physics for Babies 

In a recent survey, nearly 1 in 3 Americans said they would rather clean a toilet than do a single math problem. Tell someone on the street that you are a physicist, or worse, a mathematician, and you’ll be acknowledged with a “I hated math in school” or “I was never any good at math.” Tell them you are a quantum physicist and you’ll be lucky if you get a response. Chris Ferrie plans to vanquish those doubts and fears by introducing children to quantum physics. But, how young is too young? Enter Quantum Physics for Babies.

Hear from author and quantum theorist Chris Ferrie, IQC and University of Waterloo, Faculty of Mathematics alumnus, about his experience in communicating quantum information science to a larger audience. This general talk is suitable for all audiences.

Friday, July 28, 2017 11:45 am - 12:45 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

RAC1 Journal Club/Seminar Series

Dimensionality-driven orthorhombic MoTe2 at room temperature.

Joey Zhong

We use a combination of Raman spectroscopy and transport measurements to study thin flakes of the type-II Weyl semimetal candidate MoTe2 protected from oxidation. In contrast to bulk crystals, which experience a phase transition from monoclinic to the inversion symmetry breaking, orthorhombic phase below ~250 K, we find that in moderately thin samples below 10 nm, a single orthorhombic phase exists up to and beyond room temperature.

Monday, July 31, 2017 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Optical precursors: From fundamentals to applications

Colloquium featuring Heejeong Jeong - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Optical precursors are transient electromagnetic wave packets propagating precisely at the speed of light in vacuum through a dispersive and absorptive dielectric. Even though its existence was conjectured by Sommerfeld and Brillouin 100 years ago, the detection seemed to be impossible due to its exceedingly small amplitude and femtosecond time scale in ordinary linear dispersive media. 

Thursday, June 29, 2017 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Seminar: Timothy Proctor

Characterizing drift qubits

Timothy Proctor, Sandia National Laboratories

It is essential to benchmark and characterize real-world qubits in order to understand whether they are of sufficient quality for quantum information tasks, and if they are not, so that they can be debugged. Many techniques are designed for qubits that stay constant in time, but in reality almost all qubits suffer from some form of time-dependence.

Friday, July 14, 2017 11:45 am - 11:45 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

RAC1 Journal Club/Seminar Series

Efficient quantum memory in naturally trapped Rare-Earth ions

Mahmood Sabooni, IQC

The ability to map, store quantum states of light (e. g. single photon) to matter and later retrieve is one of the important building blocks of quantum information processing. Such a device is called a quantum memory for light.

Monday, June 26, 2017 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Colloquium: Sergey Bravyi

Complexity of quantum impurity models

Sergey Bravyi, IBM Research

I will discuss classical and quantum algorithms for simulation of quantum impurity models. Such models describe a bath of free fermions coupled to a small interacting subsystem called an impurity. Hamiltonians of this form were famously studied by Anderson, Kondo, Wilson and others in 1960s.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Seminar: Zhengfeng Ji

Constraint Propagation Games

Zhengfeng Ji, University of Technology, Sydney

Constraint propagation games are simple extended nonlocal games that are motivated by the propagation checking of quantum computation and have found powerful applications in the study of quantum proof systems recently. In this talk, we will introduce their definitions and basic properties, demonstrate their uses in larger games as building blocks, and illustrate the method that turns them into nonlocal games.

Friday, June 16, 2017 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Seminar: Andrea Morello

Scaling up single-atom spin qubits in silicon

Andrea Morello, Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology, University of New South Wales

The modern information era is built on silicon nanoelectronic devices. The future quantum information era might be built on silicon too, if we succeed in controlling the interactions between individual spins hosted in silicon nanostructures.

Spins in silicon constitute excellent solid-state qubits, because of the weak spin-orbit coupling and the possibility to remove nuclear spins from the environment through 28Si isotopic enrichment.

Monday, June 5, 2017 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Colloquium: Aram Harrow

Sequential measurements, disturbance and property testing

Aram Harrow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We describe two procedures which, given access to one copy of a quantum state and a sequence of two-outcome measurements, can distinguish between the case that at least one of the measurements accepts the state with high probability, and the case that all of the measurements have low probability of acceptance.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017 2:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Special seminar: Edward Tang

Superconducting Resonator with Composite Film for Quantum Information

Edward Tang, IQC

The full manipulation of a quantum system can endow us with the power of computing in exponentially increased state space without exponential growth of physical resources. In this thesis, we are dedicated to the developments in superconducting devices and layout design for their future applications in large-scale quantum computation.