Category: Quantum

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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)

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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!

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Seeing the Kingdom of God on the arXiv

A new entry in the best title every contest, arXiv:0907.4152:

Born Again
Authors: Don N. Page
Abstract: A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born’s rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born’s rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an observation.

WWJD? Not quantum Born’s rule, apparently.

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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 🙂

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Like Space Camp, But Quantized

A friend sent me a link to QuantumCamp:

Have you ever wondered how the microscopic Universe works? QuantumCamp is a one week journey through this strange but beautiful world – seeing nothing less than how every atom in our universe is working!
We begin with Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements. We move from Albert Einstein’s idea of quantization and end up seeing the hydrogen spectrum while contemplating the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
We witness the explosive beauty and inner order of the elements which begs for deeper investigation. We dive in and immerse ourselves in a world where quantum logic guides us to an understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.
Students entering grades 7th – 12th can enroll. These activities are designed for students who plan to choose a career in science and those who have an insatiable desire to find their connection in this Universe.

A cool idea, I think. Okay, I’ll admit it. When I was a wee lad, I attended “computer camp.” Did “computer camp” change my life? Probably not. But I got to see a Mac fry, and they let me program in Pascal which was kind of cool. And who knows, maybe QuantumCamp will be a legendary source of programmers for our future quantum computers?

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Dangers of Discussing Quantum Theory in Public

An old friend from my undergrad days sent me a link to Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack:

A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.
Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco at about 1:45 p.m. March 30.
At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about “quantum physics and the splitting of atoms,” according to prosecutors.
Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said.

No word on whether it was Bell’s theorem which set off the brawl, or a debate about the validity of string theory.

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Qubits Construction Toy

First came the qubits quiz show, and now the qubits construction toy. Okay this later one is cool because…well because it’s an awesome toy for kids of all ages (yes, I’m the guy who gives your kids blocks as a present):

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Information Causality

Recently I finally got a chance to read the new preprint arXiv:0905.2292 “A new physical principle: Information Causality” by M. Pawlowski, T. Paterek, D. Kaszlikowski, V. Scarani, A. Winter, and M. Zukowski. It’s been a long time since I spent more than a few spare hours thinking about foundational issues in quantum theory. Personally I am very fond of approaches to foundational questions which have a information theoretic or computational bent (on my desktop I have a pdf of William Wootter’s thesis “The Acquisition of Information From Quantum Measurements” which I consider a classic in this line of interrogation.) This preprint is very much along these lines and presents a very intriguing result which clearly merits some deeper thinking.
(Update: see also Joe for details of the proof.)
Continue reading “Information Causality”