- QCRYPT 2011 registration open
Dear Colleague, the registration is now open for QCRYPT 2011 – First Annual Conference on Quantum Cryptography September 12-16, 2011 ETH Zurich The conference features both theoretical and experimental advances in the field of quantum cryptography. For more information, please … Continue reading →
O brave new quantum world!
Next week is what is arguably the largest and most prosperous quantum dynamics meeting on the planet will be held at Asilomar CA … the 52nd annual Experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (ENC).
Our quantum systems engineering group will be presenting poster #614 Quantum Spin Microscopy’s Emerging Methods, Roadmaps, and Enterprises.
Every magnetic resonance researcher is familiar with Editions 1,2, and 3 of Charlie Slichter’s great text “Principles of Magnetic Resonance”, first published in 1963 (and never out of print since that date). Poster #614 undertakes to imagine what a *4th* edition of Slichter’s textbook might look like. We have just now uploaded a final version of that poster:
URL: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/ENC_2011
In particular, Slichter’s Chapter 3, titled “Magnetic Dipolar Broadening of Rigid Lattices” has been expanded to “Magnetic Dipolar Broadening and Transport Dynamics of Rigid Lattices”
This poster takes seriously the notion that any sufficiently good foil theory for quantum dynamics is a good simulation tool, and vice versa … and so the same engineering theories that help us design practical quantum technologies, also help us prove mathematically rigorous theorems, and even help us develop stronger foil theories of quantum dynamics.
Now that I’m *at* Asilomar, it turns out that Quantum Spin Microscopy’s Emerging Methods, Roadmaps, and Enterprises will be in session PA-15 … it would be great to have other “quantum foil theorists” stop by.
The 52nd ENC is over, and it was a lot of fun.
We did have one very notable visitor … who was Charles Slichter himself.
To conclude, I added to our ENC 2011 web site an audio recording of Charlie Slichter’s plenary lecture The discovery and demonstration of dynamic nuclear polarization: a personal and historical account.
This 52nd ENC was (for me) a distillation of quantum systems engineering’s past, present, and future … in particular, a demonstration that oft-times STEM roadmaps *do* chart the future reasonably accurately and *are* associated to transformational consequences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
This month’s Scientific American very accessible article on an emerging theme of synthetic, structural, and regenerative biology, titled “The Orderly Chaos of Proteins”, emphasizing that broad classes of proteins do not have deterministic structure sensu stricto, but rather functions as components of dynamical engines whose conformational plasticity is essential to their function.
Moreover, the 20th century vision of proteins-as-catalysts is being augmented by a 21st century vision of proteins-as-chaperones, whose key function is to ensure that self-assembly processes are both successful and well-regulated.
As the Scientific American article reminds us, NMR is “the workhorse” of these modern studies in medicine and biology … and in consequence the 52nd ENC, perhaps more so than any other conference, sustains a major focus on approaching the quantum limits to NMR spectroscopy and microscopy. And yes, advances in quantum information theory *are* playing a increasingly central role at applications-oriented conferences like the ENC!
Charlie Slichter’s lecture on dynamic polarization transport processes reminds us that even after 50 years of progress, we still are very far from the fundamental quantum limits to spectroscopy and microscopy … and this is very good news for young quantum researchers.