aspuru-list September 2017

aspuru-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu

15 participants
52 discussions

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] ITAMP lunch seminar - Daniel Podolsky, Technion (September 28th)

by Bekenstein, Rivka

*ITAMP Lunch Seminar* *Speaker:* Daniel Podolsky (Technion) *Date:* Thursday, September 28th *Time:* 12:00-1:00 pm Includes Pizza. *Title: *Ion crystals as a window into magnetism *Abstract: *Crystals of trapped ions are an example of ordered states of matter which emerge from the competition between kinetic energy and repulsive forces in confined volumes. I will discuss a number of examples of how these systems can give us unique access to interesting questions in classical and quantum magnetism. *Location: *B-106 @ Center for Astrophysics (60 Garden Street) *Directions: *After entering the lobby of the CfA, turn right to enter the hallway of the B building. In the hallway, turn right again, B-106 will be at the end of the hallway on the left side.

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [qip] Special CMT Seminar-Wednesday, September 27 @ 12:00pm

by Aram Harrow

Dear quanta, The speaker (Zhenghan Wang) will be here today and tomorrow. Please contact him and/or Xiao-Gang (his host) if you want to meet him. aram --------- Please join us at 1*2:00pm *on, *Wednesday, September 27, 2017 *for a *Special Condensed Matter* *Physics Seminar* with *Zhenghan Wang, *University of California-Santa Barbara The seminar will be held in the Duboc room 4-331 Please see the details of Zhenghan’s talk below. *Title:* *Simulation of quantum field theories by quantum computers* *Abstract:* The circuit model of quantum computing is based on quantum mechanics. It is an open question if quantum computers can simulate quantum field theories EFFICIENTLY. The formulation of this question is already challenging and raises the question what is a quantum field theory rigorously again. I will explain an approach to the simulation of conformal field theories based on anyonic chains. This is a joint work with Shokrian Zini arXiv:1706.08497 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08497>. Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 Time: 12:00pm Room: Duboc Room 4-331 Host: Professor Xiao-Gang Wen _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [qip] Fwd: faculty position in Quantum Information Theory at VT

by Aram Harrow

While you may not all be at the right career stage for this, it is encouraging to see more of these listings! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sophia Economou <economou(a)vt.edu> Date: Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 9:59 PM Subject: faculty position in Quantum Information Theory at VT To: "Economou, Sophia" <economou(a)vt.edu> Dear Colleagues, I would like to inform you of a tenure-track faculty position in Quantum Information Theory in the Math Department of Virginia Tech. We would greatly appreciate if you could forward this information to any suitable candidates you know and distribute widely to your colleagues in the field. The link below contains information on the opening and instructions for applying: https://listings.jobs.vt.edu/postings/79994 Thank you in advance and best regards, Sophia Economou _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] Fwd: UNC Chapel Hill : Theoretical Chemistry Faculty Search (Tenure-track Assistant Professor)

by Alan Aspuru-Guzik

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Kanai, Yosuke <ykanai(a)ad.unc.edu> Date: Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 9:50 AM Subject: UNC Chapel Hill : Theoretical Chemistry Faculty Search (Tenure-track Assistant Professor) To: Alan Aspuru-Guzik <alan(a)aspuru.com> Dear Alan, I hope this email finds you well at Harvard. I would like to bring your attention to our new theoretical chemistry assistant professor (tenure track) opening at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A detailed description of the search profile is below *Assistant Professor in Theoretical Chemistry* The Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor faculty position in *theoretical chemistry*, broadly defined. Candidates are expected to establish a vigorous independent research program and teaching excellence at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The Department and University are broadly committed to equity and inclusion. It is part of our institutional mission to teach and engage a diverse community of undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. We especially welcome applications from candidates who are committed to advancing these ideals. Applications will only be accepted electronically. Applicants should submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research plan, teaching statement, and 2-3 representative publications (optional) to: *http://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/127218* <http://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/127218>. Applicants are required to identify the names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers of four (4 ) professional references when applying. Reference providers identified by the applicant will be contacted via email with instructions for uploading their letters of support. Review of applications will begin October 15, 2017, and will continue until the position is filled. Questions should be directed to: Chair, Theoretical Chemistry Faculty Search Committee, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3290, chemsearch(a)unc.edu. *The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes all to apply, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.* I would especially appreciate it if you could pass these application details onto strong post-doctoral associates in your research group. Best wishes, Yosuke Kanai ============== Yosuke Kanai, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill CB 3290, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3290, USA Email : ykanai(a)unc.edu Web : www.unc.edu/kanai_group Phone : (919)-962-3891 -- Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University | 12 Oxford Street, Room M138 | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617)-384-8188 | http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu | http://about.me/aspuru

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [qip] Kavli IPMU Fellowship in Japan

by Ramis Movassagh

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <humanres(a)ipmu.jp> Date: Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 1:47 AM Subject: Kavli IPMU Fellow To: humanres(a)ipmu.jp Dear Colleague, We are opening nominations for the Kavli IPMU Fellow for 2017. You can find the entry point for the nomination on the Kavli IPMU website. https://www.ipmu.jp/en/job-opportunities/kavliipmufellow2017 Please let your colleagues know about this opportunity. Nominations are widely accepted, but not from an individual candidate, a student or a postdoc. The deadline for the nomination is October 6th and the deadline for the application material is Nov 1st. We ask that all nominees upload their application material and recommendation letters by the deadline. Best Regards, Hitoshi Murayama Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] Excitonics and Quantum Subgroup Meetings

by Siria Serrano

Dear All, Below are the Excitonics and Quantum Subgroup Meetings for the Fall. All subgroup and group meetings are also reflected in the Group Calendar. Excitonics October 3rd, 11-Noon November 3rd, 11-Noon November 30th, 11-Noon Quantum October 6th, 2-3 PM November 3rd, 2-3 PM December 1st, 11-Noon Cheers, Siria -- *Siria Serrano* *Faculty Assistant* *Aspuru-Guzik Group* *Harvard University **Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology* *12 Oxford St. M 136* *Cambridge, MA 02138* *P:** (617) 496-1716 <%28617%29%20496-1716>** F: **617-496-9411 <617-496-9411>*

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [qip] group meeting tomorrow and Vazirani talks.

by Peter Shor

We're meeting tomorrow at the usual time (11:00) and place (6-310). Also, forwarded from a message from Madhu Sudan, Umesh Vazirani will be giving two talks at Harvard, today at 4pm and tomorrow at 1:00. ----------- Thursday: Umesh is giving a talk at the Harvard CS Colloquium *today (4-5pm in MD G115)* on "Testing Quantum Devices and Quantum Mechanics". (Talk is disjoint from the material tomorrow.) Reading Group this Friday with Umesh Vazirani Our speaker this Friday will be Umesh Vazirani who'll walk us through a 1-dimensional quantum system and show us how to compute its ground state in polynomial time. For the deterministic/probabablistic analog of this problem, a simple dynamic program would solve the 1-d problem, but for quantum systems many technical barriers need to be overcome; and Umesh will explain the math behind this! As usual talk will be from 1:15-4:15, pizza at 1, break around 2:30. Talk is in 20 Garden Street (in Cambridge obviously!): After you enter the building take the stairwell one floor down to the ground level and use your nose to find the pizza! Madhu -------------------- Abstracts: Testing Quantum Devices and Quantum Mechanics 21 Sep Computer Science Colloquium Series Umesh Vazirani - University of California Berkeley Thursday, September 21, 2017 - 4:00pm to 5:15pm Maxwell Dworkin G115 The tremendous recent progress in the physical realization of devices based on the principles of quantum mechanics also throws up a fundamental challenge: how to test quantum devices, which are by nature imperfect and susceptible to uncontrollable faults. The classical verifier of such a device is necessarily at a disadvantage due to the exponential power of quantum systems, as well as the severe limit on the accessible information about the state of the system via a measurement. Nevertheless, an exciting sequence of results show that uniquely quantum features such as entanglement (Einstein's "spooky action at a distance") together with the key computer science concept of interactive proofs, can be leveraged to make such testing possible. I will describe how such testing can thwart a malicious adversary in quantum cryptographic settings such as quantum key distribution and certifying quantum random numbers. More sophisticated such schemes can be used to verify that a quantum computer is truly quantum. At a conceptual level, such tests of quantum devices are really tests of quantum mechanics that go well beyond the famous Bell tests, that disproved Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics. I will also describe a more pragmatic but principled approach to the testing of large scale quantum annealers - by performing a quantum Turing test comparing the quantum annealer to a suitable classical benchmark. I will discuss the results of applying such a test to the D-Wave 108 qubit quantum annealer, as well as the ~1000 qubit D-Wave 2X quantum annealer. The talk will be aimed at a broad audience of computer scientists and physicists, and I will not assume a background in quantum computing. https://www.seas.harvard.edu/calendar/event/104011 ----------------- Friday, September 22, 2017 at 20 Garden Street: Speaker: Umesh Vazirani (Berkeley) Topic: Rigorous RG algorithms for simulating 1D quantum systems. Computing low energy states of quantum many body systems is a central challenge in condensed matter physics. From a computational complexity viewpoint these are near optimal solutions to (quantum) constraint satisfaction problems. Mathematically, the problem is specified by a succinctly described Hamiltonian - an exponentially large matrix, and the challenge is to find the eigenstates with small eigenvalues. A priori it is not even clear whether such eigenstates can be succinctly described, let alone computed efficiently. In this talk I will describe novel combinatorial arguments showing that low energy states for systems of particles with nearest neighbor interactions in 1D can be described succinctly, leading to an efficient classical algorithm for computing them. The algorithm provides a new perspective on the well known Renormalization Group (RG) formalism within condensed matter physics. Over the last quarter century the famous Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) algorithm has been widely used as a numerical heuristic for identifying ground and low energy states of 1D quantum systems. A recent implementation of our algorithm shows promise for outperforming DMRG in hard cases with high ground space degeneracy or near criticality. The talk will be aimed at a broad audience of computer scientists and physicists, and I will not assume a background in quantum computing. Based on joint work with Itai Arad, Zeph Landau and Thomas Vidick. http://theory.csail.mit.edu/reading-group _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [Visting Professor] Marcos Dantus, October 6th

by Siria Serrano

Dear All, Michigan State University's Prof. Marcos Dantus will be visiting hosted by Alan on Friday, October 6th. *If you'd like to meet with him and/or attend lunch with him, let me know by COB Friday, September 22nd*. *His talk will take place at 4 PM in Pierce 209 and everyone is encouraged to attend.* His talk's title and abstract are below. *Towards a deep-learning approach to molecular dynamics* *Marcos Dantus* *Department of Chemistry, and Department of Physics and Astronomy, * *Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824* Deep learning—the combination of computer-controlled laser pulses and modern ab initio calculations running on GPU computers—will greatly accelerate our ability to probe and control chemistry. Just like chemical reagents are used for testing, chemically transforming, and sensing other compounds, photons could serve the same purpose. The key challenge is determining how to create ‘photonic reagents’ that have the desired selectivity and yield rich spectroscopic data. The Dantus Research Group has been developing computer-controlled laser pulses to probe and control laser-matter interactions. This talk will illustrate the power of deep learning as applied to chemical reactions of organic compounds proceeding through complex mechanisms involving a roaming H2 molecule. Results will also be presented on how computer-controlled pulses are being developed for improving medical diagnosis through spectroscopic biomedical imaging. Cheers, Siria -- *Siria Serrano* *Faculty Assistant* *Aspuru-Guzik Group* *Harvard University **Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology* *12 Oxford St. M 136* *Cambridge, MA 02138* *P:** (617) 496-1716 <%28617%29%20496-1716>** F: **617-496-9411 <617-496-9411>*

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] [qip] Fwd: [Qip2018-announce] QIP 2018 - Call for registration + student support

by Aram Harrow

====================================================================== CALL FOR REGISTRATION The 21st Annual Conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP 2018) Delft, the Netherlands January 13-19, 2018 https://qutech.nl/qip2018/ ======================================================================= QIP 2018 is the twenty-first international conference on theoretical aspects of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum information in a series that started in Aarhus in 1998, and was last held in 2017 in Seattle. Hosted by the QuTech <https://qutech.nl/> at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, QIP 2018 will feature a tutorial program, plenary talks, contributed talks, and a poster session. Important dates: Talk submission deadline: September 24 (AoE timezone, i.e. 1pm Sep 25 in the UK) Poster submission deadline: October 22 (AoE Timezone) Notifications for both posters and talks: November 5. Travel support deadline: November 10 Early registration deadline: November 19 Conference in Delft: Jan 15-19, 2018 (with tutorials on Jan 13-14) The event registration site is open. Please note the November 19 deadline for early registration rates. People are encouraged to reserve hotel rooms early at the hotels listed at https://qutech.nl/qip2018/qip- 2018-travel-visa-and-local-information/ For more details on submission, registration, and attending QIP 2018, visit https://qutech.nl/qip2018/ . Travel support: We are happy to announce that NSF has provided a travel grant for QIP 2018 to support U.S.-based students and postdocs in need. Additionally, the local QIP 2018 organising committee will provide travel support to a limited number of international PhD students. For more details, please visit: https://qutech.nl/qip2018/qip-2018-travel-visa-and-local-information/ _______________________________________________ Qip2018-announce mailing list Qip2018-announce(a)lists.tudelft.nl https://listserv.tudelft.nl/mailman/listinfo/qip2018-announce _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip

6 years, 7 months

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] Group meeting, Thu Sept 21, 1:30 PM, Div Room

by Ian Kivlichan

Hi all, Tomorrow Flo will speak at group meeting - his title and abstract are below. We'll start at 1:30 instead of the usual 3:30. All the best, Ian ----------------- Title: Practical optimization for automated materials discovery Abstract: High-throughput screening has emerged as a valuable and effective tool for materials discovery in various fields. While modern high-throughput screening systems can process several hundreds of thousands of compounds per day the approach suffers from vast search spaces as well as other constraints such as the available budget, available time, waste production and others. Simple combinatorial scans of the search space are therefore impractical. This necessitates sophisticated algorithms which propose only those points in search space for evaluation, which are expected to perform well under the applied objective function. Such algorithms need to learn relevant features in the search space quickly to reduce the number of costly evaluations of the objective function. This talk presents an approach for global optimization problems based on Bayesian statistics. We will start with a review of Bayesian statistics and consider the traditional Gaussian process based Bayesian optimization technique. We will demonstrate challenges for this method, which are relevant for automated materials discovery, and propose a new algorithm which overcomes these obstacles.

6 years, 7 months

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aspuru-list September 2017