Quantum Information and Computing from the Engineers' Perspective

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Date: Nov 7 Noon - 14:00 EST Title: Quantum Information and Computing from the Engineers' Perspective Abstract: Our daily communications depend on radio waves, such as those used by Wi-Fi and cellular networks, while virtually all wired communications have turned to light waves. Waves are highly advantageous information carriers. At the same time, electronic devices have shifted from analog to digital, leveraging digital technology's core strength: robust error correction that keeps error rates from growing exponentially. Combining these foundational principles gives quantum waves unprecedented computing power. The wave nature enables concurrent computing, processing vast amounts of information simultaneously. Meanwhile, the particle nature- more precisely, its quantum or discrete nature- restrains the growth of error rates. By synthesizing wave-based information processing with quantum discretization, quantum computing achieves both massive parallel execution and scalable, error-resilient computation. Studying quantum computing from such an information-engineering perspective, we can see why digital technology is critical to achieving low error rates. Not taking full advantage of the quantum nature of information is the reason that the most widely used superconducting qubits cannot achieve low error rates, while neutral-atom, trapped-ion, and photonic qubits can. The digital nature of qubits, however, comes with a readout bottleneck. A qubit's readout can only be a binary number, 0 or 1, even though the data it carries is a pair of complex numbers. This is why designing quantum computing algorithms is difficult. However, this readout difficulty is a boon for encrypted communication, in which only the party with the encryption keys can read out the transmitted qubits. Speaker: Dr. Yuan John Jiang earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 10/1991. His dissertion was "Auger Recombination and Impact Ionization in Semiconductor Lasers and Avalanche Photodiodes". He has 11 researched on quatnum optics and semiconductors physics. He was a postdoctoral researcher between 1991-1995. He earned his master's degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 6/1987. He earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Beijing University in 7/1984.