On January 30th, 2015, Claudia Benedetti defended her thesis Decoherence, non-Markovianity and quantum estimation in qubit systems subject to classical noise and thus obtained her PhD degree from the University of Milan.
We all congratulate with Claudia for this important achievement in her research career and we wish her all the best for the future. Well done Claudia!!!
The next Quantum Expo workshop, on the topic Quantum estimation with classical and nonclassical states, will be held on February 18, 2015 at the Physics Department of the University of Milan (Aula Polvani) at 11:00. The workshop will feature talks by Gerardo Adesso (University of Nottingham) and Daniel Braun (Universität Tübingen).
Download the poster with program and abstracts!
We are glad to announce that the next event in the series “Quantum Expo“, featuring a talk by Peppe Liberti, titled “Il racconto della scienza”, will be held on January 27, at 11:00 in Aula E.
Our PhD student Marina Samoylova has been awarded a 2014 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Her research interests are theoretical investigation of photonic band gaps in optical lattices and mode-locked Bloch oscillations in ring cavities filled with cold atoms. Congratulations, Marina! See also the SPIE press release.
Great news for AQM and the FIRB project “LiCHIS” – Stefano Olivares together with Dario Tamascelli (Department of Physics, University of Milan) received a one-year grant for the project “Generation, characterization and application of non-classical continuous-variable states for quantum information protocols” supported by the Department of Physics of the University of Milan through the “Sviluppo UniMi” plan.
The project aims to enhance a setup for the generation of squeezed sates of light, that is currently present in the Quantum Optics Laboratory at the Department of Physics, up to the application level in quantum information protocols. This will require theoretical, numerical and experimental efforts to reach the expected objectives. All members of the AQM group will be involved, but, among them, the synergy with Simone Cialdi that leads the Quantum Optics Laboratory will be one of the key ingredients for the success of the project.
Furthermore, as the third year of the “LiCHIS” project, coordinated by Stefano Olivares, is devoted to the advanced analysis of correlations in optical systems, the new grant will allow to extend the research to the field of continuous-variable non-classical states, such as the squeezed states, which are the building blocks to generate continuous-variable entangled states. This new opportunity (and challenge!) will indeed improve the final results of “LiCHIS”.
Another good news for AQM and “LiCHIS” project (FIRB 2010 – Futuro in Ricerca). A paper describing the first experimental realization of “quantum illumination”, proposed so far by S. Lloyd [Science 321, 1463–1465 (2008)], has been just published in PRL and received a comment on the journal Nature. The result has been achieved by the experimental Quantum Optics group at INRIM (L. Lopaeva, I. Ruo Berchera, I. Degiovanni, G. Brida) led by Marco Genovese and by our group at UniMi.
In brief, quantum illumination exploits quantum correlations (entanglement) in order to enhance the detection of a faint object in a high-intensity thermal background. The realization of the protocol has required not only experimental efforts, but also a thorough theoretical analysis to find the best scenario to implement the protocol taking into account the current technological resources.
The joint efforts by INRIM and UniMi have lead to a slightly different protocol with respect to the original one, but it has been proved for the first time that a quantum protocol can show clear advantages with respect to classical ones, i.e. based on classical correlations. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the common belief that the advantages of quantum technologies are hardly applicable in a real context, due to the fragility to noise and losses, is not general, thus challenging the prevalent paradigm and paving the way toward their practical application.
More details at http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i15/e153603
Dr. Berihu Teklu joined us as starting from February 2013 as a research fellow with a ICTP grant (TRIL program). All the AQM’s members congratulates Berihu on this success and welcome him back to the group.
This is another very good news for AQM, which is steadily growing and quickly
becoming a European theoretical facility for quantum estimation of
states and operation for quantum technology.
Dr. Matteo Bina joined us as starting from February 2013 as a research
fellow within the LiChiS project led by Stefano Olivares.
All the AQM’s members congratulates Matteo on this success. This
is a very good news for AQM, which is steadily growing and quickly
becoming a European theoretical facility for quantum estimation of
states and operation for quantum technology.
Good news for AQM. A new paper introducing the discording power of a unitary transformation has been just published in PRL. The paper reports the results of a collaboration of a group member (Matteo) with Francesco Plastina from Calabria University and Fernando Galve and Roberta Zambrini from University of Balearic Islands.
The discording power of a unitary transformation assesses its capability to produce quantum discord, and the Letter shows that exist gates which are optimal discorders for any value of purity and that they belong to a class of operators that includes the SWAP. Other gates, even those universal for quantum computation, do not posses the same property: the CNOT, for example, is a perfect discorder only for states with low or unit purity, but not for intermediate values. The discording power of a two-qubit unitary also provides a generalization of the corresponding measure defined for entanglement to any value of the purity.
More details at http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i1/e010501