PME Quantum Colloquium Series: Saikat Guha, University of Arizona

When the information carrier is a quantum-mechanical medium, such as photons or atomic systems—be it naturally occurring or an engineered system—that information can be processed (or computed upon) in fundamentally more powerful ways compared with a classical computer processing classically-represented information. This has implications in many applications, including more powerful laser-communications receivers, higher-resolution sensors that include telescopes, surface topography instruments, magnetic field sensors for imaging neuronal firing patterns, fluorescence microscopes for cellular imaging, fiber-optic gyroscopes and more, quantum computers that can solve certain problems inaccessible by classical machine or help accelerate certain computations, and various secure multiparty computations whose security is premised by the laws of physics. A large swath of engineering, scientific and social-science disciplines must converge to bring these technologies to fruition, to create significant societal impact. In this seminar, I will give a broad overview of the field of engineered quantum systems for enhanced information processing, and discuss a few illustrative examples from communications, sensing, imaging and computing. I will end with an overview of the Center for Quantum Networks, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center (ERC), which is a 10-year multi-institution research project aimed at architecting the quantum internet by developing and integrating all the underlying technologies, algorithms and associated protocols.

Learn more