(* Please note the unusual day ) Dear group, Tomorrow Gian Giacomo will tell us about his work during group meeting. The talk will have two parts. Please see the title and abstract of his talk below. Cheers, Felipe --------- 1) Quantum computation beyond the adiabatic regime The efficiency of adiabatic quantum computation is determined by the size of the minimum spectral gap. When the gap is small, the change in the Hamiltonian have to occur slowly in order to satisfy the adiabatic condition. Here, we envision the quantum dynamics as a series of Landau-Zener passages that can be performed either in the adiabatic as well as diabatic regime. The aim (familiar to adiabatic quantum computation) is to end up in the ground state of the problem Hamiltonian. For large system sizes, we resort to the exponential reduction method to characterize in an efficient way the local gaps between the instantaneous eigenvalues. 2) Photonic adiabatic quantum computation and photonic Trotterization schemes I will discuss two intriguing ideas that are based on a new linear photonic setup in Englund's lab (MIT).