I’m off to Zurich tomorrow for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing which I’m greatly looking forward to (this will be my first trip to Switzerland.) What I’m not looking forward to is the 15.5 hours it will take me to get from the Seattle airport to the Zurich airport! So, any recommendations for papers I should read, lectures I should listen to, or videos I should watch in order to keep from going insane on during the flight?
Adiabaticly Failing for Random Instances
An interesting paper on the arXiv’s today, arXiv:0908.2782, “Adiabatic quantum optimization fails for random instances of NP-complete problems” by Boris Altshuler, Hari Krovi, and Jeremie Roland. Trouble for D-wave?
Continue reading “Adiabaticly Failing for Random Instances”
Microsoft Station Q Postdocs
Want a job hacking away at topological quantum computing (and more) by day and surfing (by morning?) on the beautiful Southern California coast near Santa Barbara? Okay, well maybe surfing isn’t part of the job description, but Microsoft’s Station Q at UCSB has postdocs available with a deadline of October 16, 2009:
Station Q will be recruiting postdoctoral researchers. We are primarily interested in applicants with a strong background in quantum Hall physics, topological insulators, quantum information in condensed matter, and/or numerical methods, but will consider excellent candidates with different backgrounds.
Details of the application process can be found at http://stationq.ucsb.edu/jobs.html
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)
Quantum Consulting Job
Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a science and technology consultant in quantum information sciences. Help be a part of quantum revolution! Description and contact info below the fold.
Continue reading “Quantum Consulting Job”
Quantum Police, Arrest This Woman
Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is “Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking.” Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don’t know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research (“cracking?” and “hacking?” btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It’s Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described her job as “a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University” not as “policewoman working on quantum hacking and cracking.” And here I was hoping that we’d have someone to arrest anyone making false claims about quantum mechanics!
Help Rod With His Summer Reading
Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:
I’m feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.
So, I’m looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most
important papers of the decade. It doesn’t have to be an even
hundred, but I’m looking for a good summer’s reading. (Given that
it’s mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list
anyway, depending on where you want to place the “decade” boundary.)
I want these papers to cover *ALL* fields of computer science and
engineering; I am by nature catholic in my reading.
Head over to his site and help out with your favorite gem of CS/engineering!
OMG QIP=PSPACE!
Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here)
Title: QIP = PSPACE
Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous
We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the containment of PSPACE in QIP follows immediately from the well-known equality IP = PSPACE, the equality QIP = PSPACE follows.
This solves a long standing open problem (we can say long standing in quantum computing when we mean less than nine years because our field is so young.) It has always been known that PSPACE is in QIP, but prior to this result (assuming its correct: I just downloaded the paper and am starting to read it now) the best known inclusion in the other direction was that QIP is in EXP (this result is due to Kitaev and Watrous.) But wait a second, what the hell are all these letters representing?
Continue reading “OMG QIP=PSPACE!”
Solid State Quantum Job
David Poulin sends me a job announcement for quantum information processing in the solid state at the University of Sherbrooke:
Permanent position for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) on solid state quantum information processing
University of Sherbrooke is seeking candidates for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC). The successful candidate will obtain a permanent full professorship in the Physics Department of University of Sherbrooke in the Faculty of Sciences. The CERC program aims to attract and retain the world’s most accomplished and promising minds. This program will provide the Chair with a 10 millions dollar (CAD) grant over a seven year period. University of Sherbrooke has been selected to present one of the 40 candidates to the international selection committee of the CERC program that will select half of the proposals.
The team of researchers in the Physics Department has distinguished itself in the following areas: Quantum Information, Superconductivity, Strongly Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Photonic Applications. Sherbrooke University has the best infrastructure in Canada for research on quantum materials. Our outstanding research facilities include: the most important combination of low-temperature (down to 0.01K) and high-magnetic field (up to 20 T) equipments in Canada, world-class micro fabrication clean rooms, a central cryogenic facility with in-house liquid Helium supply, a state of the art cluster of equipment for material characterization, and a computing infrastructure with two of the most powerful computers in Canadian Universities. In addition, more than three hundred square meters of laboratory and office space is already being built to host the successful candidate and his or her team.
The candidate will join Alexandre Blais, David Poulin and Michel-Pioro-Ladrière who are already working in the field of the CERC and will be able to take advantage of interactions with members of the Institut TRansdisciplinaire d’Informatique quantique (INTRIQ), of the Regroupement QuĂ©bĂ©cois sur les MatĂ©riaux de Pointe (RQMP) and with members of the Quantum Information, Quantum Materials and Nanoelectronic programs of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
For additional information, please contact Alexandre Blais, Michel Pioro-Ladrière, David Poulin, or André-Marie Tremblay. Interested candidates should send a CV with a letter of introduction before 17:00 Eastern Daylight Savings time, August 21 2009 to the following address. Strict confidentiality will be observed.
Monsieur le doyen
Faculté des sciences
Offre d’emploi no 00421
Université de Sherbrooke
Faculté des sciences
Sherbrooke (Québec) J1K 2R1
So you don’t have to google it, 10 million CAD = 8.95015 million USD 🙂
Quantum Information Science Workshop Report
The report from the Workshop on Quantum Information Science has now been posted. Color commentary soon 🙂