Dr. Barry Sanders is AITF iCORE Strategic Chair in Quantum Information Science and Director of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Calgary. Dr Sanders also holds a QianRen B Chair in the Division of Quantum Physics and Quantum Information of the National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale at the University of Science and Technology China. Dr Sanders received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Calgary in 1984 and a Diploma of Imperial College supervised by Professor Sir Thomas W. B. Kibble. He completed a PhD in 1987 at Imperial College supervised by Professor Sir Peter Knight. His postdoctoral research was supervised by Professor Gerard Milburn at the Australian National University then at the University of Queensland and by Professor Crispin Gardiner at the University of Waikato. Dr. Sanders joined the Physics Department of Macquarie University in 1991 and was there for 12 years, including 6 years as Department Head, before moving to Calgary in 2003.
Dr Sanders is especially well known for seminal contributions to theories of quantum-limited measurement, highly nonclassical light, practical quantum cryptography and optical implementations of quantum information tasks. His current research interests include quantum resources & algorithms, optical & atomic implementations of quantum information tasks and protocols, quantum processes in biological systems, and machine learning for quantum control. Dr. Sanders is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.), the Optical Society of America, the Australian Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is a past President of the Australian Optical Society past Founding Co-Chair of the Canadian Association of Physicists Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics and former Leader of the Optical Society of America Quantum Optical Science and Technology Technical Group. Dr Sanders is Editor-in-Chief of New Journal of Physics, a former Associate Editor of Physical Review A, a former Editor of Optics Communications and a former editor of Mathematical Structures of Computer Science.

Tutorial Topic: Implementations of quantum information
Website: http://www.iqst.ca/people/home/bsanders/

Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar is an Associate Professor of physics at the LUMS Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. He helped establish the physics department and was among the principal founders of the School’s experimental facilities and curriculum. He remained Chair of the Physics Department for a period of five years. Ideas from his physics instructional laboratories have been replicated in five Pakistani universities. His research interests encompass spintronics, magnetism and optics. Sabieh has published around fifty research articles in international journals including Science and Physical Review Letters. He is the General Secretary of the Khwarizmi Science Society which is aimed at popularization of science at the grass roots levels. Prior to joining LUMS SSE in 2007, Sabieh was a post-doc in chemistry and materials science at University of California, Berkeley and a PhD student, as Rhodes Scholar, at the Oxford University. He is recipient of the TWAS medal in physics in 2008 and the National innovation Prize in 2015.

Tutorial Topic: Introduction to quantum information
Website: http://physlab.org/muhammad-sabieh-anwar-personal/

Dr. Abuzer Yakaryilmaz is a theoretical computer scientist working on computational complexity for quantum models having limited and restricted memories, also known as small space--bounded quantum Turing machines and quantum automata. He completed his PhD in Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) in 2011. His thesis title is "Classical and Quantum Computation with Small Space Bounds". Then he did 3-year postdoc in Andris Ambainis' group in Latvia. After this, he worked as a researcher in LNCC (Petropolis, RJ, Brazil) between 2014 and 2016.

Tutorial Topic: Introduction to constant-memory quantum machines
Website: http://abuzer.yakaryilmaz.com  

 

Dr. Benno Salwey was born, raised and has studied in the area of Freiburg, southern Germany, which lies beautifully at the feet of the black forest. After his masters in physics at the Quantum Optics and Statistics group at Andreas Buchleitner, he pursued his PhD under the inspiring reign of Gilles Brassard, one of the founders of the field of quantum cryptography, and Stefan Wolf, an expert not only in cryptography but also in the philosophical aspects of quantum theory. His main interests are the ultimate limits of quantum cryptography as well as the foundations on which quantum theory is built.

Tutorial Topic: (Quantum) Cryptography based on minimal principles

These lectures focus on how to prepare, protect, process and read quantum information with photons, ions, superconductors and semiconductors. We also discuss applications and assessing progress for such systems.

Speaker: Dr. Barry Sanders

The first part of the tutorial will deal with the essentials of quantum information. It will provide a review of the tools of quantum mechanics revolving around the concepts of quantum states and dynamics? How are states and dynamics described? What is the difference between pure and mixed states? These essential concepts will then lead to the concepts of entanglement, purity and entropy. The first session will close with a discussion on quantum measurements and their types.

Based on these preliminary ideas, in the second part, we will exemplify some basic quantum circuits and algorithms for computing as well as quantum communication. The archetypal quantum teleportation will be described. There will be snippets on why quantum states cannot be perfectly cloned, how errors can be corrected and quantum non-locality, eventually followed by a motivation, and proof of Bell's inequalities.

The third part will deal with a review of adiabatic quantum computation and the emergent areas in topological quantum information processing. There will be several examples and exercises that will be touched upon in the review session.

Speaker: Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar

We start with the basics of automata theory and review deterministic and probabilistic automata shortly. Then, we introduce quantum finite automata (QFAs) and provide some simple examples representing how we can gain advantages of quantum computation. We also present some algorithms that can read the inputs many times, known as two-way models (2QFAs). As a nice and interesting topic from computational complexity, we also show some examples of interactive proof system protocols where the verifier is a 2QFA. Depending on the remaining time, we represent how QFAs can implement more general quantum operators (superoperators).

Speaker: Dr. Abuzer Yakaryilmaz

In today’s age of information, where information can be of high value, we have the need to privately communicate massive amounts of data all over the earth. In classical cryptography Shannon’s converse theorem states that, if no further assumptions are made, e.g., on the computational power of the adversary and the complexity of calculating certain functions, then the length of the key used to encode a message must be at least equal to the entropy of the message in order to guarantee perfect secrecy. Thus, the parties who wish to communicate secretly necessarily need a secure channel in advance in order to establish the secret key — which requires a trusted physical carrier of information and becomes in general infeasible on the large scales of today’s communication.

Quantum theory in turn makes the problem of large scale secret key distribution feasible. Only a small shared secret is needed to authenticate a classical channel between the parties with a message authentication scheme. Most of the secure communication channel can be replaced with a completely insecure quantum communication channel, and thus untrusted physical carriers of (quantum) information such as light-particles can be used to establish a long secret key.

The essence of security proofs of such quantum key distribution protocols is the impossibility to predict outcomes of measurements of quantum systems, formalized by so-called Bell-Kochen-Specker theorems. We will investigate entanglement-based protocols and (you will) derive a quantitative Bell’s theorem which, in principle, allows for security proofs even when the correctness of quantum theory (which, in particular, puts constraints on a potential adversary) is not assumed and only necessary assumptions are made — i.e. the strongest possible adversary is considered. Finally, if we do not fall short of time, we will introduce the formal tools to construct attacks in this context and attempt to convey the intuition behind the known constructions.

Speaker: Dr. Benno Salwey