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Joshua Nunn

A third breakthrough concerns the transfer of coherence between optical and material systems, one of the major goals of QIP IRC. Quantum memories for light are required to store photons within quantum optical networks, allowing probabilistic operations to be synchronized.

Sougato Bose

Entanglement or "quantum correlations" between distant systems is a pivotal resource in quantum information processing. For example, if entanglement could be established between qubits belonging to two separate quantum processors, they could effectively act as a single, more powerful, quantum processor.  Thus emerges the idea of having substantial entanglement between opposite ends of a spin chain, so that this chain could be used as a quantum bus connecting spins (qubits) in two separate processors.

 

Janet Anders:

Ancilla-Driven Quantum Computation (ADQC) is a new model of quantum computation that combines the advantages of gate-based and measurement-based quantum computation [1]. ADQC is very well suited to experimental situations as it naturally uses static, long lived qubits as register qubits which are addressed sequentially by a flying, easy to manipulate qubit, called the "ancilla''.
Quantum Technology Briefing at the Institute of Physics

Quantum physics is at once mysterious and highly practical, underlying many inventions we take for granted in everyday life – such as the laser and the semiconductor microchip.  The Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Quantum Information Processing (QIP IRC) is a 5-year, £10 million research initiative set up by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to focus UK activity in this area.  Running from 2004 to 2009, the QIP IRC is now nearing its end and researchers gathered with representatives of science, business and government organizations at the Institute of Physics in London on 10 December to hear about what the collaboration has achieved.
QuCoCo Workshop feedback (Oxford, 9th - 10th November 2009)

QuCoCo workshop recently took place in Oxford with the support of the QIP IRC.  The workshop was aimed at early stage researchers and was attended by a mixture of post-docs and doctoral students, who presented results on the topic of "Quantum Correlations and Computations".   Whilst the QIP IRC is nearing the end of its term, many participants at the workshop were keen to find a way to support future workshops in the same spirit to cement the collaborative networks established by the QIP IRC.

A full booklet of abstracts can be requested by emailing qucocoworkshop@gmail.com.  Here I will summarize a selection of the results presented:

Dr. Jeremy L. O'Brien

Congratulations to Dr Jeremy O'Brien for being awarded the 2009 European Quantum Information Young Investigator Award ......

Janus Wesenberg

While the building blocks for few-bit quantum computers have already been demonstrated, scaling these systems up to large quantum computers remains a challenge. One problem is to develop physical systems that can reliably store thousands of qubits, while allowing individual addressing of each bit. With this issue in mind researchers, from the University of Oxford, Yale University, and the University of Aarhus in Denmark, have proposed to store hundreds of qubits as spinwaves in an ensemble of billions of electron spins.


Dan Browne

Since its discovery in the early part of the 20th century, quantum entanglement has inspired puzzlement, and Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen famously described some consequences of entanglement which seemed at odds with natural assumptions about physical laws. This intuition was made more explicit by the seminal work of John Bell, who showed that the correlations between measurements upon spatially separated systems, should, based on very natural assumptions, fulfil certain bounds, while quantum mechanics violates this bound. More recently, Greenberger, Horne, Zeilinger (GHZ) and Mermin gave an example of a correlation present in measurements upon a three-body entangled state, where classical physics would predict the opposite. Our work shows that there is a direct link between these famous puzzles of quantum mechanics and measurement-based quantum computation.


John Morton

  Quantum entangled, or "Schrödinger cat", states can be very delicate and easily perturbed by their external environment. This sensitivity can be harnessed in measurement technology to create a quantum sensor with a capability of outperforming conventional devices at a fundamental level. In a paper recently published in Science, Jonathan Jones and his colleagues compared the magnetic field sensitivity of a classical (unentangled) system with that of a 10-qubit entangled state, realised by nuclear spins in a highly symmetric molecule (comprising nine 1H nuclei around a central 31P). They observed a 9.4-fold quantum enhancement in the sensitivity to an applied field for the entangled system and showed that this spin-based approach can scale favorably compared to approaches where qubit loss is prevalent. This result demonstrates a method for magnetic field sensing technology, based on quantum entanglement.


Professor Sir Peter Knight

Imperial College London

For his outstanding contributions to Physics in the UK and globally through both his scholarship as a pre-eminent Atomic and Molecular Optics theoretician and as a charismatic and effective leader of research and research organisations.

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