Seminar: Eva Lindroth and the Nobel prize

It is a pleasure to invite you all a seminar with prof. Eva Lindroth from Stockholm University.

Her background is with atomic, molecular and optical physics. Her contributions to the field is diverse and impressive. She is also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Vice Chair for the class of Physics.

In this seminar she will tell us about the Nobel prize – naturally with emphasis on the physics prize. We will hear about how the laureates are elected. And she will tell us about particularly famous laureates such as Curie, Einstein and Meitner. Meitner is, perhaps, the most grave omission ever made when it comes to the physics prize.

Much of Eva’s research is very closely related to this year’s and last year’s Nobel prizes, the latter being awarded within the field of attosecond physics with her fellow Swede Anne L’Houllier as one of the recipients. This year’s prize is, of course, particularly interesting to our colleges at the AI group – highlighting the close connection between physics and AI.

Time: Wednesday 30th from 12.00

Place: PS439 in P35 (We will try to find a larger room if need be)

On behalf of the MatMod group and the Quantum Hub,

Sølve

Seminar: Frederik vom Ende

We invite all colleagues interested in open quantum systems and quantum information to the upcoming seminar by Frederik vom Ende from Freie Universität Berlin (please see the title and abstract below). The seminar will take place next Thursday, October 10th, at 13:00 in P35-PS439. Lunch will be provided on-site.

Quantum-Dynamical Semigroups and the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space

The idea underlying open systems theory is to describe the evolution of non-isolated systems—at least approximately—via a differential equation ρ'(t)=Lρ(t) with L of a special form, called Lindblad- or GKSL-form. This is, however, not the only way to tackle this problem; another successful approach is to consider the system coupled to its environment, and then extract the system’s dynamics by tracing out the environment from the combined unitary evolution. While the physics literature features well-known approximations which guarantee when these two descriptions are compatible, in this talk we will investigate under what conditions they can match precisely: Our main result is that GKSL-dynamics can be written exactly as the reduced evolution of system plus some environment if and only if the environment is infinite-dimensional with an overall unbounded Hamiltonian. In doing so we obtain a second-order Taylor-approximation for bounded system-environment Hamiltonians, with some familiar coefficients.

Seminar: Yves Rezus

It is a true pleasure to invite you to a seminar with our guest researchers Yves Rezus. Yves is spending this academic year on sabbatical and has chosen to come to us!

Do come and listen!

Abstract:

Encounters with single-quantum emitters

Yves Rezus

Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS)

Single-quantum emitters are the smallest possible light sources. They consist of trapped atoms, molecules or engineered nanostructures, which emit one photon at a time. Research in single-quantum emitters has taken an enormous surge in the past few decades, leading to applications ranging from biological imaging to quantum computing.

In this talk I will give an experimental perspective on single-quantum emitters, focusing on what it takes to observe them in the laboratory and to exploit their properties in real-world applications. Along the way we will see what single-quantum emitters can teach us about fundamental quantum mechanics.

QBism as introduced by Anders Kvellestad

This Friday, 28th of June, we have the pleasure of hosting Anders Kvellestad, from the University of Oslo, who gave us an introduction to QBism!

That is a relatively new interpretation of quantum mechanics that emphasizes the role of the observer in defining quantum states. QBism, or Quantum Bayesianism, interprets quantum probabilities as personal beliefs about the outcomes of measurements, rather than objective properties of physical systems.

His lecture was thought-provoking and sparked a lively discussion with numerous questions from the audience (see photo). We are looking forward to his second seminar after the summer break, where he will delve deeper into the intricacies of QBism.

Cool workshop

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.

Commuting in a noncommutative space

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.

Quantum Adjustments

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.

Right side: Susmit Kumar, Pascal Sado, Lars Kristian Skaar and Bjørnar Karlsen from the Norwegian Metrology Service. Our own Maryam Lotfigolian and Aleksandar Davidov, left side, gave a very interesting presentation on their work on routing optimization using quantum annealing for Ruter.

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.

Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences gets a visit

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!

Arnstein Wee and a creative picture of a quantum processor.

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.

Seminar: Perdo Ribeiro

It is a pleasure to invite to this years first Quantum seminar.

Perdo Ribero from the University of Lisbon is presently our guest at the Hub. Upcoming Monday, the 22nd, he will tell us a bit about one of his research interests, namely Random matrices on dissipative quantum dynamics

Time and place: Room PS523 in P35, OsloMet. 12.00-13.00.

Abstract:

Understanding the dissipative dynamics of complex quantum systems is essential to describe quantum matter at large time scales. However, even within a simplified Markovian description, studying the spectral and steady-state properties of Lindblad operators remains a challengiing task. In this talk, we present some novel insights into universal features of generic open quantum systems under Markovian dissipation by using ensemble averaging based on (non-Hermitian) random matrices. We examine three representative cases: quadratic Liouvilians, dissipative SYK models, and fully random Liouvilian operators. For this last example, we present a recent systematic classification of many-body Lindblad superoperators based on the properties of the Lindbladian under antiunitary symmetries and unitary involutions.

Quantum jumps at Holmenkollen

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.

Proud organizers: Andre Laestadius and Sergiy Denysov.
The venue: Holmenkollen Park Hotel.
Some of the participants at Roseslottet.