Washington Quantum Computing Meetup

Topic : Some Open Problems in Fundamental Physics

Summary:
In his famous Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in 1900, Lord Kelvin talked about “two clouds” on the physics horizon:
1. The first one involved the question, how could the earth move through an elastic solid, such as essentially is the luminiferous ether?
2 . The second is the Maxwell-Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of energy”. He was bang on. The first cloud dissipated with the discovery of special relativity, while the second one owes its disappearance to quantum mechanics.
Are there any clouds on the physics horizon now? It seems that both relativity and quantum physics have withstood the test of time and have showed no experimental deviations for over a century. But their successes are, Dr. Vedral believes, coming to an end. Dr. Vedral would like to channel Lord Kelvin and discuss some current problems in our fundamental theories of physics but from the viewpoint of a quantum information theorist. Among them are
1. the universality of quantum superpositions (i.e., can anything be superposed?);
2. the status of the quantum principle of local tomography (i.e., are measurements on individual quantum systems sufficient to reveal entanglement?);
3. the status of potentials in fundamental interactions (e.g., is the Aharonov-Bohm effect really non-local?).
The big questions and potential two new clouds -that are related to the bridge between the physics of micro and the physics of macro are

1. is gravity quantum?
2. can dark energy and matter be understood within the standard model? If we are lucky, perhaps these new clouds will also lead us to new theories in physics.

Bio:
Vlatko Vedral (PhD and BSc at Imperial College) is a professor of quantum information at University of Oxford. He has published over 400 research papers on various topics in quantum physics and quantum computing and is one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers. He has given numerous invited plenary and public talks during his career. These include a specialised talk at a Solvay meeting (2010) and a popular one at the International Safe Scientifique (2007). He was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007, the World Scientific Medal and Prize in 2009, the Marko Jaric Award in 2010 and was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2017 and a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2020. He is consulting the World Economic Forum on the Future of Computation. Vlatko is the author of 4 textbooks and 2 popular books (“Decoding Reality” and “From Micro to Macro”). He gives regular interviews to the media and is actively engaged in popularization of physics also by writing for New Scientist, Scientific American and major UK and overseas newspapers.

Moderator: Pawel Gora, CEO of Quantum AI Foundation

Topic: Painting Quantum Pictures with Walks on Graphs
Date: Oct 14 2023 Saturday 13:00 -15:00 EDT

Summary: When we think of quantum computing, we tend to think of qubits, gates, or annealing, but there is another paradigm, that of walks on graphs. In this talk, Dr. Clark Alexander will show a couple of quantum walks on graphs, ant then in a fun application, use them to paint pictures.

Bio:
Dr. Clark Alexander completed his PhD in mathematics at Northwestern University. He's currently serving in several director and advisor positions in AI, Logistics, Quantum Information, and Finance, as well as coaching youth soccer. He also maintains several hobbies, and will happily discuss them with you should you reach out to him on linkedIn.

Moderators: Pawel Gora, CEO of Quantum AI Foundation and Dr. Sebastian Zajac, member of QPoland
Zoom registration form will be emailed to registered participants no later than 1 hour prior to the event.

Topic: Gdsfactory - An Open Source Python Flow for Circuit Design, Verification & Validation
Date: Oct 29 2023 Sunday 14:00 - 16:00 EDT ( 11:00 am - 13:00 PDT)

Abstract:
For efficient design, verification and validation of integrated circuits and components it is important to have an easy to customize and extend workflow. Python has become the standard programming language for machine learning, scientific computing and engineering.
Gdsfactory is a python library to build chips (Photonics, Analog, Quantum, MEMs, …) that provides you a common syntax for design (KLayout, Ansys Lumerical, tidy3d, MEEP, MPB, DEVSIM, SAX, …), verification (Klayout DRC, LVS, netlist extraction, connectivity checks, fabrication models) and validation (JAX neural network model extraction, pandas, SQL database).
In this talk we describe the gdsfactory design automation tool. Gdsfactory provides you an end to end workflow that combines layout, verification and validation using an extensible, open source, python driven flow for turning your chip designs into validated products.
Speaker:
Joaquin Matres received his Engineering (2009), M.Sc. (2010) and PhD (2014) degree in Telecommunications from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain. For his PhD he built CMOS-compatible all-optical switches and logic gates at IMEC and CEA-LETI foundries. During his 6 month internship in Intel Corporation and 2.5 years in Hewlett Packard Labs, he worked on hybrid tunable lasers, wavelength selective switches and microring based optical transceivers. Then as the first engineer that joined PsiQuantum he worked on design, layout and validation of large scale Quantum computing circuits, where he was involved in most tapeouts during 3 years. Since 2020 Joaquin has been working at X Moonshot Factory (Formerly known as Google X) developing Free Space Optical Transceivers to bring affordable internet to developing countries. Joaquin is also an active developer of many open source projects such as gdsfactory, awesome photonics and open source Process Design Kits (PDKs) (such as GlobalFoundries180 and Skywater130).
Joaquin also works closely with open source developers at Google with the "Build Your Own Silicon" program, fostering an open-source community and ecosystem for the development of next-generation chips. Google has spearheaded the machine learning ecosystem since the open-sourcing of TensorFlow in 2016, and Joaquin is actively involved in replicating the success of open source tools for machine learning into the field of chip design.

Moderator: Il Young Chung, co-organizer of Quantum Computing and Data Science

Zoom registration form will be provided no later than 1 hour prior to the event start time.
Live stream link will be emailed to registered participants 15 minutes prior to the event.

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