QIP 2006, to be held in Paris, now has the list of talks for this workshop here. There were 160 submissions! There are eight invited talks, sixteen long talks, and sixteen short talks. Lots of interesting talks, which makes me wish I could have figured a way to attend (that and I’ve never spent any time in Paris.)
By the way, for those of you thinking of applying to graduate school in quantum information science theory, this list of speakers, and the institutions they represent, would probably be a good place to start.
O brave new quantum world!
from quick review of the affiliations it appears that Quantum Information is centered geographically in CA, with a stronghold at Caltech, as well as a few other places – Berkeley, Santa Barbara, etc. Almost no representation of other parts of US! Strongly represented are Canadian schools and Europe.
Is this representative of distribution of science as well, or is this a small-number fluctuation of some sort?
(Sorry for posting twice. Previous post had a broken link. Dave, you can erase my previous post if you want)
Conferences are not the best way of deciding what are the centers of activity in the QC field. A much better way is to look at the bottom line, arxiv. Another fascinating resource is the NSF awards search engine, which gives full information on all NSF grants. Unfortunately, DARPA and other US defense agencies that are prime funders of quantum computing, do not publish such information, probably because they want to keep their corruption secret.
In the US, Federal money has gone mainly to NIST and to some universities(Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, Yale and many others).
NIST has done some impeccable experimental work on ion trap QCs.
I think Caltech and MIT have gotten the lion share of the university money, but I wouldn’t describe either of them as bustling centers of QC activity. Their pace is sleepy at best:
MIT has very little to report at QIP 2006, and the same was true at QIP 2005. The following (still funded?) prominent QC researchers from MIT had nothing to report at either conference: Lloyd, Shor, Chuang, Fahri, Cory, Havel, Gershenfeld.
The QUIC project at Caltech was awarded a 5 year, 5 million dollar grant by DARPA in Sept. 1996 to build a prototype quantum computer using cavity QED (Quantum Electro Dynamics). They produced zip, not even a 2 qubit machine. To reward their performance, the NSF then gave them funds to start and continue one (or maybe two, depending on how you read their website) quantum information “institutes”. While people like Kitaev have produce some interesting theoretical, pie in the sky results, and Mabuchi has thrown shindigs on quantum control (a topic tangentially related to quantum computers), the bottom line is that they are in no hurry to get a quantum computer up and running, or to invent any new QC algorithms .
To be fair, US funding of quantum computing has been dismal in the past few years. This is no doubt related to scarce funds due to spending on the war in Iraq, Star Wars research, Haliburton contracts, Tax relief for the super-rich, and other curious priorities of our beloved president.
Canada, Europe, China and Australia, all have VERY strong QC programs, and, put together, they dwarf the US efforts in the QC field.
Hm, it seems Tucci and I live in alternative universes!
I don’t think the arxiv is a good yard stick for good places to go to grad school in quantum information theory mostly because it doesn’t distinguish among the quality of the submissions. Of course I don’t recommend the QIP speaking list as an exclusive list of “good places” but it is a good place to start as this is the conference that has a pretty good reputation amoung theorists in quantum information science. I’m saying you could do a lot worse than to work with the people who are speaking at QIP.
Also I disagree with the characterization of the situation at Caltech at MIT. I could point to lots of work at either place which I think is very valuable, but as some particular examples I would point to the work of Guifre Vidal and Frank Verstraete on a quantum information science perspective on many-body quantum systems, the work of Robert Raussendorf on fault-tolerant cluster state quantum computing, the work of Andrew Childs and Pawel Wocjan on quantum algorithms, etc. etc. I know less about MIT but would point to the work of Aram Harrow (as Isaac Chuang’s graduate student) in quantum information theory, the work of Iordanis Kerenidis on quantum algorithms, the work of Peter Shor and Igor Devetak (now at USC) on quantum channel capacities, etc. I also don’t think a lack of papers from “bigwigs” has much to do with a place: the vibrancy of most places is the graduate students and the postdocs.
I also disagree that funding for quantum computing has been dismal in the past few years. And I think it is especially important to distinguish between the experimental funding and theory funding. For example there is no way that the US is spending less than the rest of the world in quantum computing experiment. On the other hand in theory, the field is more balanced and certainly Canada, Europe, and Australia have very large and very healthy theory groups. Of course I do agree that more spending on research in theory would be great, but that is what everyone thinks about his or her field.
I also don’t think Caltech and MIT have gotten the linos share of the money. There are plenty of very robust groups spread throughout the US who receive lots of money to do quantum computing research (and again it is important to distinguish between theory and experiment funding.)
I also disagree that Kitaev’s work is pie in the sky. One man’s pie is another man’s meal, I guess!
BTW, I would personally say that the state of quantum computing theory is very healthy. There are still results, about one a month, that I think are fascinating and show theory is heading in new interested directions.
Unfortunately, the NSF award search engine is not working currently. It used to work really well in the past.