Dear group members,
I promised to some of you some updates about the conference. All the
proceedings include a transcription of our discussions, so be prepared to
read them and see what kind of good (and wrong) things people are saying!
Quite fun, as 50% of the time or so is discussion and 50% presentations.
The meeting is happening at the same hotel (and actually I think the same
room, the Solvay room) where the Einstein, etc. meetings happened. It is a
square table setup with the ~50 or so participants around the table.
RECEPTION:
Belgium city hall. Met Tobias Brixner who has a setup similar to Andy
Marcus' (photoemission detection, rather than fluorescence) that gives him
subdiffraction imaging using a four-wave mixing type experiment. The theory
for it should be the same as Alejandro's. Met Mrs. Solvay, we will go to her
house on Thursday, tomorrow.
a) First talk: Stuart Rice. Fifth or so slide: ENAQT. He described our work,
and it was a big component of the first talk. Whaley and others discussed
Anderson localization vs. Zeno. Bob Harris talked about the Zeno effect,
etc.
At the end of the talk, Stuart posted 5 open questions. One of them (#3) was
pretty much efficient quantum state tomography to understand quantum
control.
At the beginning of the discussion, Graham Fleming said "Ok Alan
Aspuru-Guzik has a protocol for #3, why doesn't he explain it". I explained
what our QPT is and why it is not "efficient" as Stuart wanted, but it
generated some interesting discussion.
Another open question #1 was if there is a "thermodynamics" for open
systems. Interestlingly, Ronnie Kosloff did not intervene. I want to show
now one slide of Cesar's quantum engines as well in my talk.
Fleming talked about the need of molecular dynamics, for which I will talk
as well. Correlations were mentioned several times. I will see what I can
say in my talk.
When Mark Ratner talked, he started talking about Pointer States (all wrong
in my opinion), after some reading of the wikipedia article and reminding
myself of what Cesar's lazy states paper discussed about them, I corrected
him publically. Plenio and Vedral agreed with my definition, and we had a
nice discussion afterward.
More things happened during the first day, but perhaps the most interesting
ones relating to our group were shown. I was very happy that we were so
prominent during the first discussion!
Anyway, I will keep you posted, later I go to dinner with Engel, Mukamel,
etc. so gotta run.
Best,
Alan
Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Associate Professor
Harvard University | Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
12 Oxford Street, Room M113 | Cambridge, MA 02138
(617)-384-8188 |
http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu