ETH-Zurich, the MIT of Switzerland (or Europe), has hosted a spate of quantum conferences lately. The largest, called QIPC, for “Quantum Information Processing and Communications,” covered both experiment and theory, and took place at ETHZ’s suburban Science Center campus, in the HCI building, which looks like an elegant homage to MIT’s legendary Building 20, incubator of radar and much else during its 55 year existence.
A few weeks earlier, QIFT11, a small workshop on Quantum Information and the Foundations of Thermodynamics invoked quantum information to shed a suprising amount of new light on such time-worn problems as Maxwell’s Demon and the origin of irreversible phenomenology from reversible dynamics.
This week, QCRYPT 2011, which boldly calls itself the First Annual Conference on Quantum Cryptography, is taking place in ETHZ’s downtown CAB building, again featuring both theory and experiment.
O brave new quantum world!