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A Mailing List for Quantum Information Science!

A while back, Dmitry Maslov who is currently a program direct at the NSF pointed out to me that there wasn’t really a good mailing list for the greater quantum computing community.  As you may have noticed this blog has turned into a place where I post such announcements.  Of course this gets in the way of important blog posts that could occur at the Quantum Pontiff, like those discussing politics and conference “referee” reports. (*ahem*)  So in order to get around this I’ve gone out and done created what Dmitry suggested: a quantum information science mailing list.
Okay so here is how this works.  First of all there is a traditional mailing list.  You can subscribe to it at this webpage.  You can also unsubscribe from this same webpage.  Of course email is for old farts like me.  So all of the announcements will also be posted on the blog located at http://dabacon.org/qspeak.  This blog, of course, has an RSS feed: http://www.dabacon.org/qspeak/?feed=rss2.  The announcements will also be tweeted: http://twitter.com/qisannounce.  I will also be rebroadcasting these announcement back here on this blog.  Note that when I do this the main text will be in the extended text for the blog post.  This means these should take up less space on the front of this blog or in your own personal RSS feed.
Okay so that is how you can read and receive updates for this list.  What about submitting and also what should be submitted?  Well first of all the list is moderated.  Moderated by…me.  Hopefully in the near future I’ll add some more moderators so that posts can be made more rapidly.  So basically the procedure is to email the list at: qspeak [[at]] dabacon.org.  Subject?  Well I’m hoping it’s things like jobs, conference announcements, funding opportunities, etc.  The general rule is that it should be linked to quantum information science, broadly construed, meaning physics, computer science, foundations, etc.  If it doesn’t seem to have enough quantum information content it will be rejected but how much is enough will be left up to the Supreme Court of the United States of America (they’re good at things like this, right?)  Once the message is approved it will be posted immediately to the blog and tweeted.  A weekly digest email will then be sent out for those who are subscribed to the email list.  Right now this isn’t automated…there was a bug in the dreamhost api that they haven’t gotten back to me yet, but eventually this will just happen without me having to format the email, which will be very nice, timewise at least for me.
Anyway hopefully you all can spread the word about this new mailing list / blog / twitter feed.  Comments, questions, concerns, catching problems with the system, etc are greatly appreciated.  Leave a comment or send me an email at qspeak [[[at]]] dabacon.org.

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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?)

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Good and Bad News on the U.S. Deficit

Warning politics to follow! Politics with questionable data sources!

Recently the New York Times made a very cool web application in which you could select different methods for closing the deficit (which they break down into a short term 2015 and long term 2030 deficit.) I’ve always wanted to make sure a tool because I hate to say it, but most discussions of federal budgets have severe magnitude issues (order of magnitude physics, a great class to take!) Of course one can argue with the numbers and options the New York Times provides (see bottom of application for a list of where this data came from) but it is still an interesting exercise to carry out.

Even more interesting to me is that they allowed people to tweet the budgets they created and then they went out and collected data about these tweets. Here is that data. Of course the readership of the New York Times will not be representative, and this will be further biased by selecting people who tweet, but seeing as how I saw this tool linked to by several more conservative/libertarian blogs as well as by some of my more libertarian facebook friends, I’ll bet the demographic isn’t as bad as one might guess at first glance. One could probably figure out the bias from other surveys about these suggestions.

So, assuming that the demographic isn’t too distorted (big assumption of course, but roll with me on this one) what can one conclude? Well the first thing is the good news. I took the data from the 6898 twitter users and then started going down the line of most popular ideas until the deficit was balanced. This occurred at the 58 percent level (return estate tax to Clinton levels was the one that put it over the top.) So one could say that if this survey is in any way representative (not likely) that there is a path forward that has much more than majority support! The budget produced, by the way, consists of 41 percent tax increases and 59 percent reduction in spending.

Now the bad news. If I took the list and only implemented those for which there was a majority of support from those who were at the extremes of the survey (the Times broke out the people who balanced their budgets using 75 percent tax increase or 75 percent spending cuts) then there was a huge shortfall ($418 billion in 2015, $1345 billion in 2030.) Interestingly also the only such majority supported terms were spending cuts.

Another interesting breakdown is to take the identified taxers and spending cutters and to use the ones that they have a majority favoring and that the overall survey has a majority favoring. If one takes the tax increasing crowd and uses only the options that have an overall majority then one covers the deficit in 2015 (with a slight billion surplus) but fails to cover the long term 2030 deficit (has a $505 billion dollar deficit). If, on the other hand, one takes the tax cutting crowd and only uses their majority supported favorites, one does not close the short term 2015 deficit ($179 billion deficit) nor the long term ($390 billion deficit.) This comes all from spending cuts.

So there are some interesting things here if I close my eyes to the validity of the data. First it’s that there is majority support for addressing the deficit problem. Second, the extremes on both sides are incapable of solving this problem with majority supported proposals. So in short what is holding back deficit reduction is not support from the general public, but the polarizing climate in which reasonable people come together and compromise. Okay my own bias is that this is the main structural problem with the deficit 🙂

(Of course one should note that there are those who do not want to address the deficit today, especially in the short term where the U.S. economy is in uncertain times. There are also (separate) “reasonable” arguments to be made that a small deficit is not at all a bad thing.)

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Toronto CIFAR Meeting

My last trip to Canada for a CIFAR conference was….interesting.  This time I’m in Toronto for the quantum computing CIFAR meeting and I’m happy to report that the meeting is full of people who mostly believe quantum theory and who also happen to be doing very interesting work.  My favorite talk, because I’m biased to this line of work, was Robert Raussendorf’s talk on the universality for measurement-based quantum computing on the 2D AKLT state (work he did with Tzu-Chieh Wei and Ian Affleck.  The authors are TAR, heh.)  It was also interesting to hear the state of position based quantum cryptography.  It seems that history (bit commitment) is repeating itself?  Marcin Pawlowski also gave a very neat derivations of Bell inequalities that I’d never seen….using an Escher drawing!
Some photos.  First of all it was not clear if the pain the sign below was related at all to quantum information processing:
And then there was what some would consider computer scientist’s heaven:
I did manage to have a beer and write some equations in said bar.  I’m certain they are correct.

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March Meeting Madness

The 2011 APS March meeting deadline for submission of abstracts is today.  Chris Fuchs writes with some stats about current submissions from the topical group on quantum information and in particular the number of quantum foundations talks (a list of foundation-ish talks is listed in the email):

As I write to you, 3200 abstracts have already been submitted for the APS March Meeting, with 140 of those earmarked for the Topical Group on Quantum Information.  Very importantly for quantum foundations, however, 34 of those abstracts (culled from all sessions) can be considered with good justification quantum foundations submissions!!  In other words, at the moment, we’ve got 1% of the whole meeting thinking about the foundations of physics!-

Have a look at some of the titles and speakers below; there are going to be some very good talks at this meeting.  It will be a grand opportunity for everyone in our community to mix and mingle and learn from each other.

Please don’t forget that the abstract submission deadline is tomorrow, November 19, at 5:00 PM EST.

I really encourage everyone who wants to see quantum foundations thrive and be memorable to please submit a talk to this meeting.  Encourage your colleagues and students too.  Let’s build a critical mass.  Your voice will count.

The place to go is:

http://www.aps.org/meetings/abstract/instructions.cfm

You must have an APS membership before submitting ($128 regular, $64 for recently completed PhDs, and $0 for students first joining), but you can still submit an abstract even if you don’t have your membership number yet–the instructions at the link explain how to do it.  (It is not necessary, but please do spend the extra $8 to join the Topical Group on Quantum Information, the official home within the APS for quantum foundations research.)

Sincerely,

Chris Fuchs

Long Talks:

A Brief Prehistory of Qubits

Benjamin Schumacher

Quantum Information and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: A Story of Mutual Benefit

Anton Zeilinger

Toward a Conceptual Foundation of Quantum Information Processing

Giulio Chribella

On Mutually Unbiased Bases

Berthold-Georg Englert

Quantum States as Probabilities from Symmetric Informationally Complete

Measurements (SICs)

Åsa Ericsson

The Lie Algebraic Significance of Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements

Steven T. Flammia

Report on the Zeilinger Group SIC and MUB Experiments

Christophe Schaef

States with the Same Probability Distribution for Each Basis in a Complete Set of MUBs

William K. Wootters

Short Talks:

Physics as Information
Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano

Quantum theory cannot be extended
Roger Colbeck, Renato Renner

The quantal algebra and abstract equations of motion
Samir Lipovaca

Scaling of quantum Zeno dynamics in thermodynamic systems
Wing Chi Yu, Li-Gang Wang, Shi-Jian Gu

Mathematical Constraint on Realistic Theories
James Franson

Uncertainty Relation for Smooth Entropies
Marco Tomamichel, Renato Renner

Quaternions and the Quantum
Matthew Graydon

A Linear Dependency Structure Arising from Weyl-Heisenberg Symmetry
Hoan Bui Dang, Marcus Appleby, Ingemar Bengtsson, Kate Blanchfield, Asa Ericsson, Christopher Fuchs, Matthew Graydon, Gelo Tabia

Proofs of the Kochen-Specker theorem based on the 600-cell
P.K. Aravind, Mordecai Waegell, Norman Megill, Mladen Pavicic

Proofs of the Kochen-Specker theorem based on two qubits
Mordecai Waegell, P.K. Aravind

Quantum Theory for a Total System with One Internal Measuring Apparatus
Wen-ge Wang

The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy
Lidia del Rio, Renato Renner, Johan Aaberg, Oscar Dahlsten, Vlatko Vedral

Pseudo-unitary freedom in the operator-sum representation
Yong Cheng Ou, Mark S. Byrd

Quantum Computational Geodesic Derivative
Howard Brandt

Hardy’s paradox and a violation of a state-independent Bell inequality in time
Alessandro Fedrizzi, Marcelo P. Almeida, Matthew A. Broome, Andrew G. White, Marco Barbieri

Topos formulation of History Quantum Theory
Cecilia Flori

Quantum Darwinism in an Everyday Environment: Huge Redundancy in Scattered Photons
Charles Riedel, Wojciech Zurek

Redundant imprinting of information in non-ideal environments: Quantum Darwinism via a noisy channel
Michael Zwolak, Haitao Quan, Wojciech Zurek

Foundational aspects of energy-time entanglement
Jan-Åke Larsson

A Bigger Quantum Region in Multi-Party Bell Experiments
Matty Hoban, Dan Browne

Qutrits under a microscope
Gelo Noel Tabia

Quantum systems as embarrassed colleagues: what do tax evasion and state tomography have in common?
Chris Ferrie, Robin Blume-Kohout

Modal Quantum Theory
Michael Westmoreland, Benjamin Schumacher

On the Experimental Violation of Mermin’s High-Spin Bell Inequalities in the Schwinger Representation
Ruffin Evans, Olivier Pfister

Measurement backaction and the quantum Zeno effect in a superconducting qubit
Daniel H. Slichter, R. Vijay, Irfan Siddiqi

A derivation of quantum theory from physical requirements
Markus Mueller, Lluis Masanes

And that’s just the “foundation”-ish talks.

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Rush Science

It looks like QIP talk accepts and rejects are out.  Sadly a piece of work I’ve been hacking on for a while didn’t make the cut (eventually it will make it’s way to the arXiv.)  But I did get one of the more amusing reviews sentences I’ve seen:

However, working this idea out seems to a require a protocol which is rather involved and, in some places, subtle.  Consequently, I was not able to work through and understand the construction in the time available.

Which is, perhaps, one of the best condemnations of the computer science conference system I’ve ever seen!

All rush and no play makes science something something.

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Announcing the Quantum Information Science Announcement List

Back in the early days of quantum computing, one could almost keep up with the entire field by attending a few select conferences, reading the arXiv, and keeping in contact with a few colleagues.  Quantum information science (quantum computing, quantum information, and all its related brethren) is now a diverse and large field and keeping on top of everything is very difficult.  At the suggestion of Dmitry Maslov (who is currently a NSF Program Director) it seems that it would be very nice to have a general clearing house for announcements to send out to the community.  Thus this new blog.

So how will this work?  Well basically it will work just like any other moderated mailing lists.  You send in your announcement to .  It gets forward to moderator (currently only me, Dave Bacon, but am considering adding more once I get the tools to allow multiple moderators in place).  Then the moderators approve or reject your announcement.  It then gets posted to this blog, and put in the queue for an announcement via email to the mailing list.  This email announcement list will go out once a week, assuming there are announcements to be sent out.  You can subscribe and unsubscribe to the email list via this webpage.

In addition to subscribing via email, you can also follow the postings via rss (here is the feed) and on twitter (@qisannounce).  If anyone would like to include the RSS feed on their own blog they should feel free to do so.

Comments and feedback are, of course, greatly appreciated.

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Doing My Part

Ryan Williams ACC. Which reminds me the other day a student of mine accidentally called coNP, coCP. Yep, turns out CP is a class. So the question is: will P versus NP be resolved before or after all two alphabetic symbol complexity labels are used up?