Category: Quantum Computing

Posted on

A What Bit?

A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:

Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon’s otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty space. These photons could be used to detect very small magnetic forces. Additionally the photons emitted contained two spin states and were able to exist in that state for nearly a millisecond before their wave function collapsed. The emitted photon is essentially a long-lasting qbit which could, with further development, be entangled with other adjacent qbits for uses in quantum computing. Another team at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, working in conjunction with UCSB, was able to detect the spin of a single electron in a diamond environment. At the same time, a group at Harvard was able to locate within a nanometer a single Carbon-11 impurity using its nuclear spin interactions.

Qbit? What’s a qbit? Doh.

Posted on

Fault Tolerance – It's No LAFTing Matter

Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):

Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
“fault” underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. “Fault tolerance” is the term given to a
system’s ability to cope in some way with a fault, either inherently or through
design. Fault tolerance has been studied for its application to circuits, and then
branching out to distributed systems and more recently to quantum computers, where
the concern with fault tolerance is almost the paramount issue. The relevance to
biological computation is also obvious. Papers must be concerned with mathematical
logical approaches to fault tolerance, not simply fault tolerance.
Selected papers will appear in Logic Journal of the IGPL (Oxford U. Press).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Papers due: April 17, 2009
Notification: May 22, 2009
Final papers: July 10, 2009
Workshop: August 15, 2009

Posted on

GQI 'Best Student Paper' Award at APS March Meeting (2009)

Fame and fortune could be yours. Tell your supervisor to nominate you:

Once again, GQI will award two “Best Student Paper” prizes at the APS March Meeting (2009): one for theory and one for experiment. The awards, each consisting of a $500 cash prize, are sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, respectively. All undergraduate and graduate students who are both first author and presenters of an oral or poster presentation are eligible.
To be registered for the competition, a brief nomination letter from the student’s supervisor stating that the results described in the presentation are substantially the student’s own work and that the student is currently enrolled at a degree-granting institute, must be sent via email to David DiVincenzo at divince (atatat) watson.ibm.com before the March meeting commences.
The two equally weighted criteria for the award are quality of scientific results and quality of the presentation. Judging will be undertaken by an ad hoc committee consisting of senior members of GQI.

Posted on

Benasque 2009

I’ve never made it to Benasque, and am always profoundly jealous of those who have gone:

Dear Colleague,
We are pleased to inform you that following a very successful editions of Benasque 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007, we are organizing another workshop of the similar type in June 2009. This is to invite you to apply using the electronic form that you can find on the website specified below. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible and not later than the end of March 2009. The number of participants at the Benasque Centre at any given time is limited to about 50. We will do our best to accommodate most of the applicants,however, in some cases we may be unable to find suitable time slots for all of them, i.e. we cannot guarantee acceptance.
Budget permitting, we expect to offer a modest allowance to some participants. Preference will be given to those staying for the whole duration of the workshop.
We do hope to see you in Benasque!
Ignacio Cirac and Artur Ekert
_________________________________________________________
BENASQUE 2009
Title: Quantum Information
Venue: Benasque in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Date: The 3 week period 7– 27 June 2009.
Website: http://sophia.ecm.ub.es/2009qi/
Registers at: http://sophia.ecm.ub.es/2009qi/cgi-bin/appl.pl

Posted on

Physics World Article

For subscribers to Physics World, an article I wrote The Race to Build a Quantum Computer has appeared in the February edition. Unfortunately unless you have a subscription you’ll have to pay to read the article…or better yet, pick up a copy of the magazine!

Posted on

Some Upcoming Talks

Some upcoming talks for those in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor (so many A’s!):

  • Feb 5, 5pm, University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Studies Seminars: The Symmetry Conjecture
  • Feb 6, 4:00 pm, University of New Mexico Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer
  • Feb 9, 4pm, University of Michigan Seminar: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer.