aspuru-list March 2015

aspuru-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu

32 participants
64 discussions

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Fwd: Harvard Physics Colloquium: John Martinis, UCSB, on 04/06/15

by Martin Blood-Forsythe

Dear colleagues, Those of you interested in quantum computing will find the April 6th Monday Physics Colloquium to be of interest: John Martinis is the speaker. Best wishes, Martin ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Subject: Announcement for Harvard Physics Colloquium Speaker John Martinis, UCSB, on 04/06/15 Harvard Physics Colloquium Monday, April 06, 2015 4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m. in Jefferson 250 Tea served in Jefferson 450 @ 3:30 p.m. *“Bit-flip Error Correction with Superconducting Xmon Qubits”* John Martinis *UCSB* For announcement poster please go to: http://www.physics.harvard.edu/events/colloquium.pdf One of the outstanding challenges of quantum computation has been the realization of scalable qubits with high fidelity for all necessary operations. Here I discuss the design of a linear chain of 9 superconducting Xmon qubits that allows initialization, single and two qubit gates, and fast repetitive and simultaneous measurement with fidelity in the 99%-99.9% range. This performance has allowed us to perform bit-flip error correction with 8 repetition cycles that leads to improved lifetime of the state. The use of error correction based on the surface code enables all errors, both data and measurement, to be corrected to 1st and 2nd order.

9 years

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Excitonics Seminar: Dmitri Basov - TODAY, 4:30 PM: 36-428

by Catherine M Bourgeois

Please post and forward to your groups: CENTER FOR EXCITONICS<http://www.rle.mit.edu/excitonics/> Seminar Series<http://www.rle.mit.edu/excitonics/event-type/seminar-series/> Nano-photonic phenomena in van der Waals heterostructures March 31, 2015 at 4:30 PM/ RLE Haus 36-428 Dmitri Basov Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego [Dimitri_basov_01] abstract: Layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals consist of individual atomic planes weakly coupled by vdW interaction, similar to graphene monolayers in bulk graphite. These materials can harbor superconductivity and ferromagnetism with high transition temperatures, emit light and exhibit topologically protected surface states. An ambitious practical goal is to exploit atomic planes of vdW crystals as building blocks of more complex artificially stacked heterostructures where each such block will deliver layer-specific attributes for the purpose of their combined functionality. We investigated van der Waals heterostructures assembled from atomically thin layers of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). We observed a rich variety of optical effects due to surface plasmons in graphene [Nature 487, 82 (2012), Reviews of Modern Physics 86, 959 (2014)] and hyperbolic phonon polaritons in hBN [Science 343, 1125 (2014)]. We launched, detected and imaged plasmonic, phonon polaritonic and hybrid plasmon-phonon polariton waves in a setting of an antenna based nano-infrared apparatus. Peculiar properties of hyperbolic phonon polaritons in hBN enabled sub-diffractional focusing in infrared frequencies. Because electronic, plasmonic and phonon polaritonic properties in van der Waals heterstructures are intertwined, gate voltage and/or details of layer assembly enable efficient control of nano-photonic effects. I will also discuss an ability to manipulate plasmonic response of in these structures at femto second time scales that we have demonstrated using a novel technique of pump-probe nano-infrared spectroscopy [Nano Letters 14, 894 (2014)]. bio: Dmitri N. Basov (PhD 1991, Russian Academy of Sciences) is a professor (since 1997) and Chair (since 2010) of Physics, University of California San Diego. Research interests include: physics of correlated electron systems, superconductivity, two-dimensional materials, infrared nano-optics. Prizes and awards: Sloan Fellowship (1999), Genzel Prize (2014), Humboldt research award (2009), Frank Isakson Prize, American Physical Society (2012), Moore Investigator (2014). Light refreshments will be served. The Center For Excitonics Is An Energy Frontier Research Center Funded By The U.S. Department Of Energy, Office Of Science And Office Of Basic Energy Sciences

9 years

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Excitonics Seminar: Dmitri Basov - Tues. Mar 31, 4:30 PM

by Catherine M Bourgeois

9 years

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] big office printers broken

by Joey Goodknight

Neither of the big office printers are working; I will let you know when they are again. Sorry for the inconvenience. For now, please use the ivy office printer which can be used as an IP printer with the address http://reposado.fas.harvard.edu/ using the HP protocol. -Joey

9 years

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Cambridge Residents? Vote!

by Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Dear all, It seems that the Cambridge Participatory Voting is open. It was fun for me to vote on it http://cambridgema.nationbuilder.com/ If you are a Cambridge Resident, check it out and vote for your favorites. If you vote for the digital bus arrival screens in Inman Square, you help your advisor get to school in time without checking the MBTA app on his phone (first-world problems :)) Now, seriously, there are cool proposals like bike repair stations, etc. Best, Alan Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University | 12 Oxford Street, Room M113 | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617)-384-8188 | http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu | http://about.me/aspuru

9 years

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Lenovo laptop charger

by Edward Pyzer-Knapp

Hi all One of the CEP undergrads, Trevor's, power supply for his laptop has died overnight... We can't tell whether it is the cable or the internal connection, so if anyone has a lenovo power supply (old school round one) we would be very grateful if we could borrow it for 5 mins (will save us going to buy one if it is not the problem!). Fingers crossed... Ed

9 years, 1 month

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Mac power supply

by Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Dear all, I think I brought my Mac power supply to the new meeting room yesterday during Google's group meeting. If somebody took it by mistake, let me know and hopefully you can bring it to the new office. Best Alan -- Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University | 12 Oxford Street, Room M113 | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617)-384-8188 | http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu | http://about.me/aspuru

9 years, 1 month

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] [IACS-events] REMINDER: IACS Seminar: "Summarizing Large Data Sets"--- Friday 3/27 **NEW LOCATION**

by Baker, Natasha

Date: Friday, March 27, 2015 Time: Lunch: 12:30pm; Talk: 1pm Location: Science Ctr. Hall E, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138 Speaker: Jeff Bilmes, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington Title: Summarizing Large Data Sets Abstract: The recent growth of available data is both a blessing and a curse for the field of data science. While large data sets can lead to improved predictive accuracy and can motivate research in parallel computing, they can also be plagued with redundancy, leading to wasted computation. In this talk we will discuss a class of approaches to data summarization and subset selection based on submodular functions. We will see how a form of "combinatorial dependence" over data sets can be naturally induced via submodular functions, and how resulting submodular programs (that often have approximation guarantees) can yield practical and high-quality data summarization strategies. The effectiveness of this approach will be demonstrated based on results from a wide range of applications, including document summarization, machine learning training data subset selection (for speech recognition, machine translation, and handwritten digit recognition), image summarization, and assay selection in functional genomics. Speaker Bio: Jeffrey A. Bilmes is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Linguistics. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a 2001 NSF Career award winner, a 2002 CRA Digital Government Fellow, a 2008 NAE Gilbreth Lectureship award recipient, and a 2012/2013 ISCA Distinguished Lecturer. Prof. Bilmes has been working on submodularity in machine learning for more than twelve years. He received the best paper award at ICML 2013 and a best paper award at NIPS 2013 for work in this area. Prof. Bilmes is also a recipient of a 25-year paper award from the International Conference on Supercomputing for his 1997 paper on high-performance matrix optimization. Prof. Bilmes has authored the graphical models toolkit (GMTK), a dynamic graphical-model based software system that is widely used in speech and language processing, bioinformatics, and human-activity recognition. Free and open to the public. No registration required. *********************** UPCOMING SEMINARS 4/10 Budhendra Bhaduri<http://web.ornl.gov/sci/gist/staff_bios/staff_bhaduri.shtml> (Oak Ridge National Laboratory<http://www.ornl.gov/>--- Geographic Information Science and Technology) ON "Big Data, Geospatial Computing, and My 2 Cents in an Open Data Economy" 4/24 Christian Rudder<http://www.okcupid.com/about> (OkCupid) ON “DATA: A Love Story" Click here<https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events> to subscribe to our events list. _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events

9 years, 1 month

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Applying for time on XSEDE

by Sam Blau

Hi everyone, As we've mentioned at the last couple group meetings, I'll be assembling our XSEDE allocation application. The deadline for this application is April 15th, which means it's time to get things in order. If you plan on applying for time, *please let me know by no later than this coming Monday, March 30th. * Applying for time for a project will require two main documents - a scientific overview, and a detailed summary of all calculations you plan to run, including numbers backed up by timings on XSEDE or Odyssey. If you are asking for a particularly large allocation, you could also have to prepare a third document detailing the performance and scaling of the code you plan to run. Please let me know if you have any questions or interest. Thanks! Sam

9 years, 1 month

[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Fwd: REMINDER Announcement: for Harvard Physics Colloquium Speaker Vinny Manoharan, Harvard University on 03/30/15

by Martin Blood-Forsythe

Dear colleagues, Next Monday's Physics Colloquium looks like it is going to be fantastic. Vinny does really amazing work on colloidal self-assembly and in the process has discovered some really deep things about entropy. Best, -Martin ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Maynard, Dayle <maynard(a)fas.harvard.edu> Date: Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 9:40 AM Subject: REMINDER Announcement: for Harvard Physics Colloquium Speaker Vinny Manoharan, Harvard University on 03/30/15 To: "faculty(a)physics.harvard.edu" <faculty(a)physics.harvard.edu>, " research(a)physics.harvard.edu" <research(a)physics.harvard.edu>, " grads(a)physics.harvard.edu" <grads(a)physics.harvard.edu>, " sps-list(a)hcs.harvard.edu" <sps-list(a)hcs.harvard.edu> Harvard Physics Colloquium Monday, March 30, 2015 4:15 p.m.-5:15 p.m. in Jefferson 250 Tea served in Jefferson 450 @ 3:30 p.m. *“What We’ve Learned About Entropy From Experiments On Colloidal Particles.”* Vinny Manoharan Harvard University For announcement poster please go to: http://www.physics.harvard.edu/events/colloquium.pdf *Abstract:* Entropy is one of the most interesting and confusing topics in physics. Gibbs himself said that the concept "may repel beginners." And John von Neumann is said to have told Claude Shannon to call his information measure "entropy, because nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." Of course, scientific debates are best settled by experiments. I will discuss what we have learned about entropy from experiments on colloids, systems of classical, interacting nanoparticles that can be seen under an optical microscope. We find that entropy has a complex relationship with order and symmetry, but one that can be understood within a simple framework that does not "repel beginners" -- so long as we allow that entropy is a measure of the number of states that we as observers /choose/ not to distinguish, rather than of those that are fundamentally indistinguishable. I will show how that understanding allows us to use entropy to design new materials and nanomachines.

9 years, 1 month

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aspuru-list March 2015