As the end of the year fast approaches, it’s time to review what we did in the past 12 months.
With 29 preprints (out of which 4 PRL, 1 PRX, 1 invited review article, 2 Scientific Reports, 2 recent NJP papers) QTeQ’s science is clearly out there! The group has hosted a major meeting, our members have delivered plenty of (invited) talks around the world; the group has grown in size and topics. QTeQ currently has 3 major research projects up and running and a robust research funding portfolio. Well done, everybody: 2014 was fantastic. Let’s hope 2015 will be even better.
Happy new year, QTeQ!!
mauropaternostro
December 31, 2014
New PhD projects to work at QTeQ starting in October 2015 are now available here. Applications are welcome (deadline: 13 February 2015)! For any further information, please contact Alessandro, Gabriele, Jim, or Mauro.
mauropaternostro
December 24, 2014
The second group retreat of QTeQ is taking place on 7 and 8 November 2014 at the Avoca Hotel in the nice town of Newcastle. The program puts together both science and leisure and, hopefully, this will ignite bonding, brain-storming, and creativity. The retreat is funded by an internal Research & Technology Development grant awarded to Simon, Steve, and Gabriele. Well done guys!!
mauropaternostro
November 7, 2014
Yet another “Editors’ Suggestion” for QTeQ’s research! This time is Ben’s work recently published in Phys. Rev. A to receive coverage from the APS Editorial Office: Ben’s paper on the non-destructive optical characterisation of Bose-Hubbard models, written in collaboration with Mauro and Jacob Sherson (Aarhus University) and reporting on a project driven and led by Gabriele, has just appeared in Phys. Rev. A as
B. Rogers, M. Paternostro, J. F. Sherson, and G. De Chiara, “Characterization of Bose-Hubbard models with quantum nondemolition measurements”, Phys. Rev. A 90, 043618 (2014)
and has been selected as an Editors’ Suggestion in light of his quality and relevance. This is only the latest of a series of papers from the QTeQ crew to be acknowledged by APS and covered as “Suggestions”. Well done Ben!!!
mauropaternostro
October 19, 2014
Four new PhD students have recently joined QTeQ: Conor Gallagher, Kenneth McAlpine, Sam McMillen, and Brendan Reid are the newest members of the group.
Conor will work with Alessandro on quantum computing on continuous-variable systems. Kenneth will work on correlations in quantum gases under the joint supervision of Jim and Gabriele. Sam will investigate (with Mauro) potential corrections to Schroedinger equation, keeping an eye open on possible physical tests. Finally, Brendan will study the diagnostic power of light-based probes for cold-atom quantum simulators, working under the supervision of Gabriele and with the support of Mariona.
QTeQ’s new students are sponsored by the Northern Ireland Department for Employment and Learning (Kenneth) and the EPSRC DTA (Conor, Sam, and Brendan).
mauropaternostro
October 4, 2014
Great news at QTeQ: the paper
T. B. Batalhao et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140601 (2014)
recently published in Phys Rev Lett by Gabriele and Mauro, with the key contributions from QTeQ former member Laura Mazzola and the group’s Brazilian and Irish collaborators, has been picked as an “Editors’ suggestion”. Only one in six papers published in Phys Rev Lett is selected as Editors’ Suggestions.
The Letter, which reports the first experimental investigation of finite-time thermodynamics in a quantum system, is the fourth one in a row from QTeQ being selected as Editors’ Suggestion, the fourth Letter from the group this year, and embodies a landmark in quantum control in NMR. The work on thermodynamics pursued by QTeQ keeps on attracting international attention and recognition, and is supported by generous grants from the EU project TherMiQ, and the John Templeton Foundation.
mauropaternostro
October 4, 2014
QTeQ former long-term visitor Fazal Badshah has published a paper on the dynamics of a coupled-cavity array containing multiple two-level atoms. The work, written in collaboration with Prof. Shahid Qamar (PIEAS, Islamabad) and Mauro describes the generation of multisite entangled states and the transfer of excitations resulting from the competition of tunnelling and onsite nonlinearities. Deatils of the work can be found at
Fazal Badshah, Shahid Qamar, and Mauro Paternostro, Phys. Rev. A 90, 033813 (2014)
The paper is the result of the great work that Fazal did in Belfast in 2013, supported by a HEC studentship from Pakistan and the generosity of Shahid. At QTeQ we all wish to see Fazal soon and to keep up the collaboration with him and Shahid.
mauropaternostro
September 10, 2014
The Third Working Group meeting of the COST Action MP1209 “Thermodynamics at the quantum scale” will be hosted by QTeQ on 18-20 August 2014. The meeting will be held at the Wellington Park Hotel and will host some of the best young and affirmed scientists working in the broad area of quantum thermodynamics (from fundamental features to implementations). The list of invited speakers include Antonio Acin, Lidia del Rio, Mikko Mottonen, Ahsan Nazir, and Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler, besides our own Gabriele De Chiara.
The group has worked hard to make sure that everything is set in the best possible way. Hopefully, we will have three inspiring days of great science and interaction!
mauropaternostro
August 14, 2014
New results from the collaboration between QTeQ members and the University of Calabria and Palermo, on non-Markovian open system dynamics of quantum systems have been published in Phys. Rev. A recently.
Tony (joint postdoc in Cosenza and Belfast), Carlo (now at ICL and honorary perpetual member of QTeQ), and Mauro have worked with Salvatore Lorenzo (Palermo) and Francesco Plastina (Calabria) on aspects of the hierarchy among different measures of non-Markovianity for a system exposed to competing environmental effects. The results of the work have appeared in
Tony J. G. Apollaro, Salvatore Lorenzo, Carlo Di Franco, Francesco Plastina, and Mauro Paternostro, Competition between memory-keeping and memory-erasing decoherence channels, Phys. Rev. A 90, 012310 (2014)
mauropaternostro
July 14, 2014
In the enduring effort performed at QTeQ to explore the link between the physics of quantum many-body systems and the features of quantum entanglement, Gabriele and the group’s honorary member Giacomo Torlai (LMU Munich), have recently published a new article in J. Stat. Mech., which is the reference journal of the community interested in statistical mechanics (including the quantum scenario). Details of the work, which is a result of Gabriele’s collaboration with Luca Tagliacozzo (ICFO Barcelona), can be found in
G Torlai, L Tagliacozzo, and G. De Chiara, Dynamics of the entanglement spectrum in spin chains, J. Stat. Mech. P06001 (2014)
which is a contribution to the journal’s special issue on “Quantum Entanglement in Condensed Matter Physics”. Congratulations to both Giacomo and Gabriele!!
mauropaternostro
July 14, 2014