Back from Kyoto, Japan where I attended AQIS07. What time is it right now anyway? (And is there a selective pressure in today’s scientific fields towards people who suffer less jet lag?) AQIS 2008 will be held in Seoul, South Korea.
Here is a picture of me enjoying the awesome hospitality of our hosts at a delicious dinner. This was a dinner held on top of a creek in the mountains north of Kyoto (picture thanks to the quantum computing picture achive, a.k.a Charlie Bennett).
There we a lot of good talks at AQIS, the program can be found here. My favorite line of the entire conference was definitely when one quantum information theorist responded, when asking why a particular quantity was used in a proof, “because we are trying to keep Bob from doing something stupid.” Something about designing proofs guided by keeping the protocol participants from being stupid struck me as quite funny.
The talk which I liked the most was probably the talk by Alexandre Blais (Université de Sherbrooke) on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves. Much fantastic work has been recently performed (most?) at Yale on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves (see here for example.) What is cool about this setup is that one can achieve coupling between the superconducting qubits and light which is in a strong-coupling limit, much as is done in cavity QED. Strong-coupling means that the light and qubit coupling is much stronger than other couplings of these two systems to the rest of the world (i.e. such as the rate at which the qubit decoheres or the photons leak out of the cavity you are using.) In particular this allows for very robust coupling/transmission of quantum information between the superconducting qubit and light. What was exciting about Alexandre’s talk was at the end of his talk about recent experimental results from Yale to be published soon about the coupling of two superconducting qubits to each other using the microwave field as an intermediary. Very cool stuff. It seems to me that this offers many of the benefits of traditional cavity QED for building a quantum computer, but in a much more scalable manner than is achievable in cavity QED. It definitely will be interesting to watch as these systems become better characterized and as more complex devices get implemented.
Update: This work is now on the archive at 0708.2135. I
O brave new quantum world!