Norman Hascoe Distinguished Lecture Series

Since the 1994 discovery by Peter Shor, that a quantum computer may factor large numbers more efficiently than any known classical computing strategy, research in quantum computing has been studied by a large number of research communities and its potential has been recognized by a variety of national, international, strategic, and commercial funding initiatives.

Quantum computers may be built from physical quantum systems that are already studied extensively in the laboratory: trapped ions, cold atoms, superconducting circuits, liquid and solid state spin ensembles, etc., and numerous experiments have now demonstrated precise elementary gate operations.

The lecture will review the progress within the field with emphasis on the status of physical implementation in laboratory experiments.  By taking a look at a few experiments, we will show that, some times, progress has happened due to rather simple theory ideas which have led to significant improvements of the original theoretical proposals, and some times quantum systems just behave better in the laboratory than we expect.

We conclude the presentation by discussing a few novel theoretical ideas and proposals, showing that this research is still as diverse as ever, and that we may still have only a vague image of the appearance of the first real quantum computer.