My mom retired as a Principal of High school. I was really inspired by her command over the whole school and involvement with the School Board. I was so inspired and motivated by her achievements in teaching that I always wanted to be a teacher. I had a special interest in science and was very close with my science teachers. I used to participate in science fairs and even won a few prizes along the way.
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Oh my, I ate the whole thing again. Are physicists eligible for Ben and Jerry’s sponsorships?
I’m not sure what covers more ground when I go for a long run — my physical body or my metaphorical mind? Chew on that one, zen scholar! Anyways, I basically wrote the following post during my most recent run, and I also worked up an agressive appetite for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I’m going to reward myself after writing this post by devouring a pint of “half-baked” brown-kie ice cream (you can’t find this stuff in your local store.)
The goal of this series of blog posts is to explain quantum teleportation and how Caltech built a machine to do this. The tricky aspect is that there are two foundational elements of quantum information that need to be explained first — they’re both phenomenally interesting in their own right, but substantially subtler than a teleportation device, so the goal with this series is to explain qubits and entanglement at a level which will allow you to appreciate what our teleportation machine does (and after explaining quantum teleportation, hopefully some of you will be motivated to dive deeper into the subtleties of quantum information.) This post will explain entanglement.
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When I was a graduate student, on my second year I was put in an office that was shared with two postdocs – Arne Brataas and Stefan Kehrein. It made me really feel like I was being initiated into this community of theoretical physicists – something I had been dreaming of since I was a teenager. The most conspicuous thing in the office (Harvard’s Lyman 332 if I recall correctly), was a big three or four panel poster of an astounding mountain range, craggy peaks, glaciers, steep drops. There was a small note on the corner: “The Eiger et al. – the amazing history of this poster is recounted in the book ‘Who Got Polchinski’s Office’ ”*
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A match made in heaven.
If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer was obvious to my 12-year-old self — of course it made a sound. More specifically, something ranging from a thud to a thump. There doesn’t need to be an animal present for the tree to jiggle air molecules. Classical physics for the win! Around the same time I was exposed to this thought experiment, I read Michael Crichton’s Timeline. The premise is simple, but not necessarily feasible: archeologists use ‘quantum technology’ (many-worlds interpretation and quantum teleportation) to travel to the Dordogne region of France in the mid 1300s. Blood, guts, action, drama, and plot twists ensue. I haven’t returned to this book since I was thirteen, so I’m guaranteed to have the plot wrong, but for better or worse, I credit this book with planting the seeds of a misconception about what ‘quantum teleportation’ actually entails. This is the first of a multi-part post which will introduce readers to the one-and-only way we know of how teleportation works.
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How many miles per gallon?
Thoughts while watching the Olympics …
My car gets about 30 miles per gallon of gasoline. Miles per gallon has the dimensions of inverse length squared, and the reciprocal of 30 miles per gallon is roughly the area of a circle whose diameter is 0.3 mm, or about 1/100 of an inch.
That means that when I drive my car, the fuel I consume has the same volume as a thin thread stretched along the road over the distance I travel, with a thickness just a few times the width of a human hair.*
That skinny little thread of gasoline is enough to keep my car going! Thinking about it reinforces one’s appreciation for the internal combustion engine.
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I have been teaching Chemistry, Physics and Earth Science for twenty five years now, the last fourteen at Duarte High School. I have always emphasized laboratories, focusing on the scientific process and have a philosophy of imparting translatable skills along the way. This summer I had the honor of being selected to join the IQIM Summer Research Institute and as part of that program I worked with Rana Adikhari’s research group, seeking to reduce sources of noise (enhance signal quality) for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Why? To better detect signals which indicate warps in spacetime!
I love being outdoors, even when I commute to Caltech.
Steve Flammia wrote a flattering post on The Quantum Pontiff about a game we used to play, in which Steve would ask a question and I would have just a minute or two to prepare a 20 minute mini-lecture answering the question. Steve reports that “these were not easy questions.” But actually most of them were.
Steve gives an example: “Why do neutrinos have a small but nonzero mass?”
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An excerpt from my notes (including a misspelling of “repetition”) taken at Alexei Kitaev’s seminar during his first visit to Caltech in 1997. That was a very exciting day.
In 1997, I had some disposable funding as part of a quantum computing project, and decided to seize the opportunity to bring an interesting visitor to Caltech. But whom to invite? Chris Fuchs, then a postdoc at Caltech who seemed to know everybody working on quantum computing, reported that Richard Jozsa, while attending a conference in Japan, had met a remarkable Russian from the Landau Institute named Alexei Kitaev.
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Alexei is thinking of putting some of the award money into education efforts. “My success is in large part due to good education, my teachers and the atmosphere of excitement in science when I grew up,” he is quoted as saying to the New York Times.
Alexei Kitaev, Professor of Physics, Computer Science, and Mathematics at Caltech, has received the Fundamental Physics Prize. This prize, which is being awarded for the first time, was established by Internet billionaire and one-time particle theorist Yuri Milner. The prize citation recognizes Kitaev’s “theoretical idea of implementing robust quantum memories and fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological quantum phases with anyons and unpaired Majorana modes.” As one of nine recipients, he will receive three million dollars.
Kitaev’s 1997 paper on Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons proposed exploiting exotic two-dimensional quantum states of matter for robust storage and processing of quantum information. Later, in the 2000 paper Unpaired Majorana fermions in quantum wires, he made a more concrete proposal to store quantum information robustly in suitably configured one-dimensional systems. The key insight behind both proposals is that when a quantum state is distributed non-locally among many elementary objects, it can be well protected from damage due to uncontrolled interactions with its environment. Kitaev’s ideas are now being vigorously pursued by theorists and experimentalists around the world, and in particular by researchers here at the IQIM.
Concerning the monetary value of the award, Milner explained: “I wanted to send a message that fundamental science is important, so the sum had to be significant.”
Congratulations Alexei!
Hello?… The first thing I remember feeling moments later was panic.
Five years before that day, I was a graduating senior at MIT pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Computer Science (18C for all the fellow nerds out there). I had been close to some of the most brilliant people I have ever met, like my undergraduate adviser Michael Sipser and my undergraduate research mentor in bioinformatics, Bonnie Berger. I had applied to several graduate schools to study mathematics, but had been summarily rejected by most of them. It was a humbling experience, which ultimately led me to the day I got the call. I remember clearly what day it was: February 6th, 2008. I was eating breakfast with two friends at a local diner in Davis, CA. Yes, the one place which had enthusiastically accepted me to their Ph.D. program was the Mathematics Department at UC Davis. In fact, being an international student from Greece, and given the tight State budget of California at the time (all the time), it was a miracle that UC Davis said yes. True, I had a good GPA and lots of research experience at MIT, but I did not have any direction. I did not apply to work with any particular Professor, I just applied by school name and reputation. And if it weren’t for Prof. Berger’s suggestion to apply to UC Davis, I would have applied to the top 5 graduate schools in Applied Mathematics and would be trading stocks in New York right now. I was naive.
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Quantum Frontiers 