Quantum Information and Foundations at the APS March Meeting 2012

After John Preskill’s call for more quantum participation at the APS March Meeting, I couldn’t say no to a request for a blurb about quantum info and foundations! The following is a guest post by Giulio Chiribella.
Following up the previous post by John Preskill, I’d like draw your attention to the focus session “Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations” which will take place at the APS March Meeting 2012.
If you are interested in the conceptual and fundamental aspects of Quantum Information, this is the right session for you to come and present your work! The event promises to be lively and stimulating, and will be a great occasion to advertise your recent results.
On top of that, your participation will give an important support to foundational research.The foundational space at the March meeting is a great opportunity for our community.  But it is vital to keep this space alive, responding with a visible participation and presenting talks on the best of the foundational research in Quantum Information. This is not hard to do: Over the past few years there has been an enormous amount of progresses and a burst of new exciting results at the interface between Quantum Information and Foundations.  Also, we should not forget of the numerous results in Quantum Information that, even without being explicitly foundational, continue to shed a bright light on the operational features of Quantum Theory.   It is enough to have such a vibrant scientific landscape represented next March in Boston to make the foundational session memorable!
This year’s session will start with an invited talk by Valerio Scarani, who will summarize the main ideas and the latest developments on Information Causality. Valerio’s talk will be followed by a lineup of contributed talks, which hopefully would be as many and as lively as the talks of last year’s edition, organized by Chris Fuchs, which has been a very successful event.
To participate to the session, you can submit your abstract at the webpage http://www.aps.org/meetings/abstract/index.cfm. (don’t forget that the deadline for submissions is this Friday November 11th 2011!)
A last remark before concluding:  Chatting with colleagues sometimes I noticed that potential speakers are discouraged by the 12 minutes format, which seems too short to present all the relevant details. We should remind, however, that presenting details is not really the point here: The APS Meetings are huge events where the whole physics community meets to highlight advancements and to advertise new ideas across fields, not to address the specialists of one particular field.  The format of the March Meeting talks is designed to rapidly advertise new results, and if you discover that you would like to know more about one particular result…  well, during the meeting there is a lot of free time where you can interact directly (and more efficiently)  with the speaker about the details of her/his work.
So, let us take the event in the right spirit and make the foundational space at the March Meeting a real exciting forum for the exchange of new ideas!
Hope to see many of you in Boston!

GQI needs you! — John Preskill guest blogs

The following post was written by John Preskill.
I’m writing this guest post because I want all you quantum informationists to come to the American Physical Society 2012 March Meeting in Boston next February 27 through March 2. I’m telling you now, because the deadline for submitting your contributed abstract is next Friday. That’s 11/11/11, which is easy to remember. And lucky.
Why come?
Okay, maybe the March Meeting is not for everyone. Yes, last year there were over 8000 physicists at the meeting in Dallas, including over 3200 students. But that’s not everyone. No, not quite.
And those of us who came might not treasure every memory. Standing dutifully in line for what seems like hours, yet never quite reaching that much needed cup of coffee or sandwich. Missing at least 44 of 45 parallel sessions, while wondering what’s the harm in missing all 45? Surrendering to drowsiness after too many 10-minute talks in a row. Wondering who all these people are.
No, it’s not perfect. But the March Meeting is an exhilarating experience, and you really don’t want to miss it. Though you might want to consider bringing your own sandwich.
Quantum information has been well represented at the March Meeting since 2005, thanks to the efforts of the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information (GQI). Each year the membership of GQI has swelled and our participation in the March Meeting has ramped up, which allows GQI to have an even larger presence in the next meeting. Last year 311 GQI members attended and there were 324 contributed talks in the quantum information sessions. I hope we will beat those numbers substantially in 2012.
The March Meeting  provides a valuable opportunity for quantum information enthusiasts to exchange ideas with the broader physics community, and to convey the excitement of our field. Naturally, since the March Meeting is dominated by the condensed matter physicists, the interface of quantum information with condensed matter is especially emphasized, but contributions in all areas of quantum information science are welcome.
The 2012 program will be especially exciting. GQI will sponsor or co-sponsor six sessions of invited talks covering important recent developments:  topological quantum computing with Majorana fermions, quantum entanglement in many-body systems, quantum simulations, quantum computing with superconducting circuits, quantum information processing in diamond, and silicon spin qubits. In addition, there will be an invited session about career opportunities in undergraduate teaching for quantum information scientists.
If our turnout is below expectations, the GQI Program Chair gets the blame. And that’s me. So … don’t make me look bad — come to Boston and contribute a talk!
To register and submit an abstract go to:
http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/
You should flag your abstract with an appropriate quantum information Focus Topic or Sorting Category from the list available at the website, to ensure that your talk is scheduled in the proper session.
And if you are not a member of GQI, please join. Increasing our numbers means more visibility and influence for GQI within APS, and that too is good for the cause of quantum information science.
See you in Boston!

APS March Meeting Quantum Goodness

Chris Fuchs writes in with some good news about the APS march meeting and quantum information science talks.  In total there were 359 talks submitted to the GQI topical group this year, and increase from the 256 talks last year.  This means that next year the topical group will get an extra invited session.  Woot!

More details from Chris:

Just to highlight the details of the focus sessions, the submissions they got were:

Superconducting Qubits – 75

Semiconducting Qubits – 63

Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations – 58 (or at least that’s the number I’ll claim for that session from the various sorting categories)

Quantum Optics with Superconducting Circuits – 32

Advances in Ion Trap Quantum Computation – 12

Chris has also made a handy list of invited talks, both in GQI, and those of GQI general interest:

Sunday, March 20, tutorial
Ivan Deutsch (University of New Mexico) Quantum Simulation and Computing with Atoms
Tuesday, March 22, invited session, “Quantum Information: Featured Experiments”
H. Jeff Kimble (California Institute of Technology) Entanglement of Spin Waves among Four Quantum Memories
Christopher Monroe (Joint Quantum Institute and University of Maryland) Quantum Networks with Atoms and Photons
Till Rosenband (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Quantum-Logic Clocks for Metrology and Geophysics
Robert J. Schoelkopf (Yale University) Towards Quantum Information Processing with Superconducting Circuits
Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna) Quantum Information and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: A Story of Mutual Benefit
Wednesday, March 23, invited session, “20 Years of Quantum Information in Physical Review Letters”
Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research) The Theory of Entanglement and Entanglement-Assisted Communication
David P. DiVincenzo (Aachen University) Twenty Years of Quantum Error Correction
Artur Ekert (University of Oxford and National University of Singapore) Less Reality, More Security
Richard J. Hughes (Los Alamos National Laboratory) Twenty-Seven Years of Quantum Cryptography!
Benjamin Schumacher (Kenyon College) A Brief Prehistory of Qubits
Thursday, March 24, invited session, “Symmetric Discrete Structures for Finite Dimensional Quantum Systems”
Berthold-Georg Englert (National University of Singapore) Pairwise Complementary Observables and Their Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUBs)
Asa Ericsson (Institut Mittag-Leffler) Quantum States as Probabilities from Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements (SICs)
Steven T. Flammia (California Institute of Technology) The Lie Algebraic Significance of Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements
Christophe Schaef (University of Vienna) Experimental Access to Higher-Dimensional Discrete Quantum Systems: Towards Realizing SIC-POVM and MUB Measurements using Integrated Optics
William K. Wootters (Williams College) Isotropic States in Discrete Phase Space
Focus Session: Superconducting Qubits
Chair: Robert McDermott (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
John Martinis (University of California at Santa Barbara) Scaling Superconducting Qubits with the ResQu Architecture
Christopher Chudzicki (Williams College), LeRoy Apker Award winner Parallel State Transfer and Efficient Quantum Routing on Quantum Networks
(+ 75 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Quantum Optics with Superconducting Circuits
Chair: David Schuster (University of Chicago)
Andreas Wallraff (ETH, Zurich) Tomography and Correlation Function Measurements of Itinerant Microwave Photons
(+ 32 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Semiconducting Qubits
Chair: Jason Petta (Princeton University)
Amir Yacoby (Harvard University) Control and Manipulation of Two-Electron Spin Qubits in GaAs Quantum Dots
(+ 63 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations
Chair: Christopher Fuchs (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)
Giulio Chiribella (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) Toward a Conceptual Foundation of Quantum Information Processing
(+ 58 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Advances in Ion Trap Quantum Computation
Chair: Jungsang Kim (Duke University)
Richart E. Slusher (Georgia Tech Quantum Institute) Trapped Ion Arrays for Quantum Simulation
(+ 12 submitted abstracts)
Non-GQI Invited Talks of General GQI Interest
Daniel Arovas (University of California at Santa Barbara) Momentum Space Entanglement in Quantum Spin Chains
Al an Aspuru-Guzik (Harvard University) The Role of Quantum Coherence in Excitonic Energy Transfer: Quantum Process Tomography, Molecular Dynamics and Efficiency Measures
David D. Awschalom (University of California at Santa Barbara) Quantum Control and Nanoscale Placement of Single Spins in Diamond
Patrice Bertet (CEA-Saclay) Probing the Quantum Fluctuations of a Nonlinear Resonator with a Superconducting Qubit
Immanuel Bloch (Ludwig-Maximilians University) Quantum Simulations with Ultracold Fermions and Bosons in Optical Lattices
Pasquale Calabrese (University of Pisa) Entanglement Entropies and Spectrum in One-dimensional Systems
Michel Devoret (Yale University) Prospects of Superconducting Qubits for Quantum Computation
Viatcheslav Dobrovitski (Iowa State University) Quantum Control and Decoherence of a Single Spin in Diamond
Sergey Frolov (Delft University of Technology) Spin-orbit Qubit in a Semiconductor Nanowire
Eran Ginossar (Yale University) Novel Approaches to High Fidelity Qubit State Measurement in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
F. D. M. Haldane (Princeton University) Identifying Topological Order from the Entanglement Spectrum
Ronald Hanson (Delft University of Technology) Control of Single-Spin Decoherence by Dynamical Decoupling and Spin Bath Manipulation
Kees Harmans (Delft University of Technology) DC-SQUID Quantum Non-Demolition Readout of Superconducting Flux Qubits
Ren-Bao Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) Control of Electron Spin Decoherence in Nuclear Spin Baths
Gavin W. Morley (University College London) Quantum Information in Silicon: Initialization, Manipulation, Storage and Readout
Jeremy O’Brian (University of Bristol) Integrated Quantum Photonics
Christian Schonenberger (University of Basel ) Cooper-Pair Splitter: Towards an Efficient Source of Spin-Entangled EPR Pairs
Emre Togan (Harvard University) Quantum Entanglement between an Optical Photon and a Solid-State Spin Qubit
Joel Varley (University of California at Santa Barbara) Quantum Computing with Defects
R. Vijay (University of California at Berkeley) Observation of Quantum Jumps in a Superconducting Quantum Bit
Joerg Wrachtrup (University of Stuttgart) Spin Quantum Measurements on Diamond Defects

Looks like a fantastic lineup.  The fact that there are so many invited talks outside of GQI that are quantum related is a testament to the field (of course cynics will say it is a testament to hype and funding, but who listens to cynics anyway?)

March Meeting GQI Invited Speakers

March is ages away, but it is time to start planning for the APS March meeting, to be held in the beautiful rose city, Portland, Oregon (Note to skiers that Mt. Hood is just a short distance away 🙂 ) Anyway an important part of the March meeting are invites sessions and the quantum computing/information/foundations topical group GQI is in charge of a few of these sessions. Want to nominate a session or invited speaker? Now’s your chance. Here’s the email that was sent out Friday:

Dear GQI members,
This is an email to solicit from you proposals for GQI sponsored invited sessions and invited speakers at the 2010 APS March Meeting (Portland, Oregon March 15-19, 2010.) Invited sessions and speakers are a great opportunity to highlight the most exciting results emerging from quantum information science and quantum foundations to the broader physics community.
The website for submitting proposals is now open at
http://meetings.aps.org/aps_invited/Invited/LoginForm.cfm?MT=MAR10&UNIT=GQI
and will remain open until September 15, 2009.
The GQI Program Committee has the opportunity to organize three invited sessions at the March Meeting. Proposals for these can only be submitted through the above web site. The deadline for submitting nominations is September 15, 2009.
In making proposals, please keep in mind the following APS rules: (i) no individual may receive an invitation two years in a row (unless he or she is a winner of a Prize in the second year); (ii) a single invited session is not permitted to have two speakers from the same institution (i.e., the same university or laboratory). A chair and a speaker from the same institution is acceptable.
Proposals for single invited presentations will also be considered for inclusion in the March Meeting Focus Sessions. This year, the planned focus sessions are
1. Superconducting qubits, 2. Semiconducting/solid state qubits, 3. Foundations of quantum theory, 4. Recent progress in quantum algorithms and quantum computational complexity, 5. Topological quantum computing,
and, jointly with DAMOP,
6. Hybrid AMO-condensed matter systems for quantum information science
To make a nomination, you will need to create an account at the web site and fill in the nomination form. You will need to provide reasonably detailed information about the proposed invited speakers. The more information you provide, the better the chance your proposal will be selected. If you proposal a single individual, you should give a justification for inclusion in one of the above Focus Sessions. If you propose a complete symposium, you should provide detailed information about the proposed topic of the session. Also, please indicate your preference for inclusion in the invited program of either the March Meeting or the DAMOP Meeting. Note that a full invited session at the March Meeting includes 5 speakers.
The GQI program committee will select March meeting sessions in the fall, while Focus session organizers will determine the single invited talks to be included in their sessions.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions (dabacon [nospam @] cs.washington.edu)