Summer doesn’t officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it’s all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found…
Continue reading “Summer Time”
Quantum Twitter
Is Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Information the first quantum institute to have a twitter feed?
Update: @WaterlooIQC tells me that no they probably aren’t the first. That title probably goes to iqoqi.
Gisin Wins Inaugural Bell Award
The Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (the palindromic CQIQC) recently established the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications. And the first winner is (opening the envelope, wondering whether he will find a dead or live cat inside)….Professor Nicolas Gisin from the Université de Genève:
Nicolas Gisin, Professor of Physics at the Université de Genève, is a true visionary and a leader among his peers. He was among the first to recognize the importance of Bell’s pioneering work, and has throughout his career made a series of remarkable contributions, both theoretical and experimental, to the foundations of quantum mechanics and to their application to practical quantum cryptography systems. His work on the latter, for instance, was highlighted in the February 2003 issue of MIT’s Technology Review as one of the “10 Emerging Technologies that will Change the World”.
We award the inaugural John Stuart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications to Prof. Gisin in recognition of two of his recent contributions – it should come as no surprise that they span theory as well as experiment.
Quantum Times Spring 2009
The latest issue of the newsletter of the APS topical group on Quantum Information, the Quantum Times, is now available. Of particular note is the long article summarizing the Workshop on Quantum Information Science.
Microsoft Extreme Computing Group
Dan Reed has a brief note up about a new group at Microsoft the extreme computing group (XCG) which includes among its subject areas quantum computing:
XCG was formed in June 2009 with the goal of developing radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group’s research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.
Also in the news here. Microsoft, of course, has long had a toe in quantum computing, with Microsoft station Q in Santa Barbara investigating topological quantum computing and related models. Hopefully this bodes well for continued Microsoft investing in that most extreme of computational models (okay computing with closed timelike curves is probably even more extreme!), quantum computing.
Die Sauerkraut ist in mein Lederhosen
I wasn’t at Quantum Information Science Workshop in Vienna, VA, but I heard that the topic of quantum computing “going black” came up at least a few times. One speaker mentioned during his talk that several of his former graduate students were now in “the black hole” of secret U.S. research programs and another expressed, during the open session, that the field is not yet mature enough to be conducting secret research.
Continue reading “Die Sauerkraut ist in mein Lederhosen”
IWODD, Would You?
The “International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)” now has a web site with information on the conference Oct 5-6 in Boulder, CO:
Dynamical decoupling techniques show the potential to dramatically suppress errors in quantum information and quantum control systems. To date, research in this area has been scattered between magnetic resonance experimentalists and quantum information theorists. This workshop aims to foster new relationships between experimental and theoretical researchers in an effort to speed technical developments and to promote the adoption of dynamical decoupling techniques across a variety of qubit technologies. Follow this link to see the list of invited speakers which includes Erwin Hahn, who pioneered the spin echo, as a keynote speaker.
IARPA Withdraws Funding From Major NIST Quantum Computing Groups
David Wineland runs a world class lab at NIST Boulder which has been at the forefront of ion trap quantum computing. William Phillips is a Nobel prizing winning physicist who also does quantum computing at NIST, this time at NIST Gaithersburg. To say that these are two top researchers in quantum computing, is a massive understatement. Both of the groups have produced their ground breaking work with the support of numerous alphabet soup government agencies throughout the years. Now comes word, via a Nature news article that IARPA, the intelligence community’s version of DARPA, has decided to stop funding these group’s research in quantum computing. Ostensibly the reason for this is that IARPA does not want to fund other agencies work. As a bureaucratic bullet point that sounds fine, but as a practical matter, it is, I must say, stark raving crazy. Or, as Ivan Deutsch put it in the Nature news article:
“Anyone who hears about this is shocked beyond belief,” says Ivan Deutsch of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “The world leader in quantum computing having funding being terminated based on a technicality seems incredibly shortsighted.”
A letter has been sent to John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, protesting this move.
As a research pseudo professor I depend on research funding to keep me afloat (ah, the luxury of those professor’s who actually know they will get paid in a year’s time.) Things like this scare me, not because I think I’ll run across this particular variation on crazy funding decisions, but because it reminds me that directions for researching funding come down from way up in the great clogs of the government. And if David Wineland and Bill Phillips are subject to these whims, well, then, I fear that I, a minor theorist, am completely totally doomed. In the mean time, I guess all I can do is put my two cents in that this funding move is a really really bad idea.
Online Weekly Colloquia?
Recently I’ve been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that’s not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well…I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there…which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to setup an online colloquium? Has anyone seen a setup where this has worked before? Oh, and is there any interest in such an online colloquium?
QIP 2010 – Save the Date
Via the man of many B’s, dates for QIP 2010 have been set. QIP 2010 will be in Zurich from January 18 to January 22. Website here.
Hmm, Switzerland in January for skiing?