Projects in Quantum Computing

Raymond Laflamme
NMR quantum information processing

The goal of this project will be to provide theoretical and experimental support for liquid state and solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) experiments at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC www.iqc.ca). The student will learn the basic of NMR and get involved in experiments implementing quantum algorithms such as magic state distillation, algorithmic cooling or quantum error correction.

Adrian Lupascu
Microfabricated superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions behave under suitable conditions as coherent quantum systems. The parameters of these systems are determined by design, so they behave as "artificial" atoms. Superconducting circuits are under intense research for possible applications in quantum information processing. The student who joins us will work on studies of interaction between such artificial atoms and microwave electromagnetic fields. This research is driven by the fundamental interest in atom-light interaction in the specific case of superconducting circuits. We are interested as well in quantum measurement aspects and applications to quantum information processing. The student working on this project will learn about superconducting circuits, develop models for these systems, perform numerical simulations, and be involved in experiments.

Norbert Lütkenhaus
Status Review of Quantum Key Distribution Implementations

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has been implemented in various forms since 1993. It is time to systematically review published data of experiments. In a first step, this projects systematically searchers for all published QKD experiments and categorizes the experiments according to protocol and implementation type. The results will be made available to the international community via our webpage. During this project the student will learn about QKD, its protocols and implementations. Skills sets developed are literature reserach, extraction of standarized data from non-standarized publications, finding meaningful categorizations of experiments, and clear internet-based presentation.

Squashing detectors

In optical communication one deals with light pulses which are described in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Typical threshold photon counters, however, give only two possible outcomes: click, or no-click. In optical set-up playing with polarization and timing, it is often possible to reduce the description of signal space and measurement to smaller dimensions. This project applies a technique developed in our group to investigate for specific relevant set-ups whether in that situation a reduction is possible, and how the reduced description looks like.

Quantum Repeater Protocols

Long distance quantum communication has to overcome the problem of losses, as the typical fiber optics communication channel has an exponential signal loss with growing distance. We are interested in different ways to overcome that problem using quantum memories in quantum repeater set-ups. In this project different strategies will be developed to cope with the problem that affects all implementations of quantum memories, especially decoherence effects.

James Martin
Quantum Electronics and Atom Chips. Click here for more information.

Kevin Resch
We are working on creating entangled states of light for experimental studies of quantum computation and quantum nonlocality (http://www.iqc.ca/~kresch/). The student who joins us will support these experimental efforts by working on tasks such as implementing computer-controlled manipulation and measurement of these states. In addition, they will learn about theoretical quantum information science and its optical realization.