Engineered Quantum Agents with Gerard Milburn, 7:30pm on Wednesday 11th February

Engineered Quantum Agents with Gerard Milburn, 7:30pm on Wednesday 11th February at Wagner Hall.

Galileo’s genius saw that we can learn about the world by building artefacts to exhibit simple, reproducible phenomena. We push on the world and the world pushes back. Over a century ago we discovered that some interventions produced a big surprise: the world is quantum.

Quantum theory is notoriously weird, but we understand it well enough to use it. Quantum technology seeks effective strategies to control the quantum world to make us wealthier, healthier and safer.

In this talk Gerard will describe some quantum technologies already changing our lives, including new navigation tools and algorithms for cybersecurity. The next step is Embedded AI, delivering ‘self-driving laboratories’, accelerating scientific discovery, and leading to quantum technologies beyond human imagination.

Gerard Milburn was the founding Director of the Australian Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, established in 2011. In 2024 he moved to the UK where he is a Quantum Fellow at the National Quantum Computing Centre in the UK. He has worked in the fields of quantum optics, quantum control, engineered quantum systems and recently quantum learning machines. In 2001, together with Knill and Laflamme he published a scheme for quantum computing with photons, known as the KLM scheme, that has had a major impact on the experiments in quantum optics.

Gerard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the American Physical Society. He is the author of five books including Quantum Optics (with Dan Walls), Quantum Measurement and Control (with Howard Wiseman) and Quantum Optomechanics (with Warwick Bowen).

The image above is of a quantum circuit. The Nobel prize in Physics 2025 was awarded to the three people who invented this technology. This is a false-coloured image of an 8-qubit superconducting quantum processor, fabricated at ETH Zurich. All eight qubits (red elements at the cross-junctions) are measured using a common readout line (yellow). Each qubit is coupled to a pair of readout resonators (cyan) and Purcell filters (green). Superconducting qubits are one of the hardware platforms used to realize quantum computers, which have the potential to vastly outperform conventional computers for certain problems.