QIPIRC

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

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.

 
John Morton

Dr John Morton is the 2009 recipient of the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize. John is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at St. John's College, Oxford. He has pioneered the application of techniques of magnetic resonance spectroscopy to combinations of electron and nuclear spins to store quantum information for extended times and to manipulate it with exquisite precision. He was able to establish that such systems, including those based on molecular materials, are viable for a quantum nanotechnology.

Andrew Ramsay

Coherent light-matter interactions are often understood in terms of dressed states: states that are a composite of light and matter. Recently, we have made a number of experiments to time-resolve the excitonic dressed states of a single self-assembled InAs quantum dot. We demonstrate the possibility of controlling the composition, and energies of the excitonic dressed states on a picosecond timescale. Furthermore, an experiment illustrating that a Rabi oscillation may be interpreted as a beat between two dressed states was performed.