Category: Seminars

From 9th to 12th of June, we had the pleasure of hosting a little workshop on atoms and lasers – and a couple of other things too. This was put together in connection with a visit from our esteemed colleges from Warsaw University, prof. Katarzyna Krajewska (picture), prof. Jerzy Kaminski (prince George amongst friends) and their team.

They all delivered very interesting presentations – as did Thomas Bondo Pedersen and his students from the Hylleraas Centre, which is headed by Thomas, and Morten Førre and his students. Presentations holding the promise of significant and new scientific contributions in the near future – both when it comes to pair creation, strong field ionization beyond the dipole approximation and the ability to describe complex, unbound molecular systems dynamically.

As for our local “hubbers”, our own Bendik got to demonstrate several of his very nice research results, and Sergiy gave a nice introduction to the diverse activities in our hub. We were happy to see the Regal fraction of our Quantum Hub, headed by Andre, taking and active part – both presenting and participating.

For more details – and a cool gallery, please visit the workshop’s homepage.

We thank Maryam Kaviani for taking care of virtually all practicalities. And we do not thank our technical division for remaining silent about the overly cool temperature in our original venue.

Bridging quantum theory and gravitation is a great and mind-thrilling challenge. Non-commutative geometry is considered to be a candidate for such a bridge. This mathematical concept integrates quantum principles like the non-commutativity of operators into the fabric of spacetime.

We gained insights into this fascinating topic last Friday, April 12, from a talk by our guest speaker, Anna Pachol, an associate professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Anna provided an introductory overview of the field, which holds the potential to uncover the Holy Grail: a theory of quantum gravitation.

Although Anna resides in Oslo, she commutes to Kongsberg where the USN campus is located. If spacetime does indeed prove to be non-commutative (pending experimental verification or refutation), the title of this post will make perfect sense.

Until recently we were not aware about ongoing quantum initiatives at the Norwegian Metrology Service (Justervesenet – JV). But then we got a pleasent e-mail from Susmit Kumar from JV’s Electricity group informing us about their mandate regarding accurate SI values of voltage, resistance, and current.

During a very pleasent day-long meetup Thursday 11th of April, we got to learn about their plans and ongoing work. And they learned about the scope of our hub, which includes precisely this kind of activity.

In particular, we were quite impressed by their work on Josephson junctions. If there were any doubt about the relevance of quantum technology when it comes to high precision metrology at JV, these doubts certainly evaporated during these hours together. And their ambitious plans for further quantum research would only seem natural.

We are looking forward to collaborations – both in research and education.

It was a true pleasure when the Hub was contacted by Arnstein Wee, from the Stavanger-branch of Norges tekniske vitenskapsakademi, the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. He wanted to hear more about quantum computing. Of course, asking a quantum hubber whether she or he would like to talk quantum, is a bit like asking “is the pope catholic?”. Yes!

The turnout at the gathering, March 20th was impressive. And so was the interest and quality of questions posed by the attentive audience. A true pleasure!

When yours truly is given a microphone and asked to talk about an interest close to heart, chances are that the sum of the many words which come out at a rather high pace, combined with the many, many slides, can be quite overwhelming. With this in mind, I am particularly thankful for the hospitality and the enthusiasm I was met with.

November 7th to 9th we had the pleasure of hosting a November School on Quantum Computing. At the risk of appearing cocky: Beforehand we were very proud of the program we had put together. And the lecturers did not let us down!

Several aspects of quantum computing were addressed. To name a few:

• Quantum error correction
• Quantum annealing
• Quantum reservoir computing
• Quantum hardware
• Quantum computing for quantum chemistry
• Quantum software engineering
• Quantum states encoded in neural networks
• Quantum noise

The lecturers included both academic researchers and representatives from the industry, specifically from D-Wave and IBM.

We believe it is fair to say that many large quantum leaps were made in the participants’ knowledge in quantum computing. In addition to our own PhD and Master students, people from Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Oslo, Lund University, Simula and the Norwegian School of Economics.

The venue provided a very nice atmosphere for getting to know more of the many flavours of quantum computing – and the growing community of people within the field.

Read more about it on the School’s website. Here you will also find the slides from most of the lectures – and a gallery. As small excerpt from this gallery is seen below.