Jie gets his first NJP paper!

Jie has just published his first paper in New Journal of Physics, one of the premier journals in the area of quantum information and quantum optics. The work, which is the result of the collaboration with Simon Groeblacher (University of Vienna and Caltech), sets an experimentally viable scenario for the establishment of quantum features in the state of a mechanical oscillator.

Details of the work can be found in

Jie Li, Simon Groeblacher, and Mauro Paternostro, New J. Phys. 15, 033023 (2013)

Congrats, Jie!!


Lorenzo comes back with a bang!

Lorenzo Fusco, Master student at Universita’ di Palermo and friend of the family, will be back for 6 months starting from 1 August 2013 under a PERFEST bursary. Congrats, Lorenzo, and wellcome back home!!


Fazal publishes a paper in Phys Rev A

Our Fazal Badshah, who is a PhD student at PIEAS (Islamabad), and is visiting QTeQ for 8 months under a studentship awarded by the Pakistani Higher Education Commission (International Research Support Initiative Program), has just published a research paper (written in collaboration with his supervisor Prof. Shahid Qamar) in Phys. Rev. A. Congratulations to Fazal!

Details on the study can be found in

F. Badshah, M. Irfan, S. Qamar, and Sh. Qamar, Phys. Rev. A 87, 012312 (2013)


Andre’ featured in University of Malta magazine

The academic successes of our very own Andre’ have been featured by the magazine “Think“, a publication by the University of Malta telling the stories of students, alumni, researchers, and professors from the University. The third issue of this quarterly journal has a whole page dedicated to Andre’, a true raising star in the maltese scientific panorama, including a picture where he even manages to look semi-serious!!

Tajjeb isir to Andre’!!


QTeQ grows with an important staff-member addition!

Dr. Alessandro Ferraro, currently a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at UCL (Sougato Bose’s group) and soon a temporary Lecturer at University of Sussex, will join QTeQ and CTAMOP from July on as a new Lecturer in Quantum Information!

All the QTeQ’s members congratulates Alessandro on this success and are thrilled to have him in Belfast very soon.

This is fantastic news for QTeQ, which is quickly becoming a true hub for Quantum Information Science in the UK.


QTeQ visiting student wins IOP poster prize

Visiting research student Giacomo Torlai wins the QQQ Poster Prize awarded by the Quantum Information, Quantum Control and Quantum Optics Subject group of the Institute of Physics. Giacomo prepared his poster entitled “Violation of Bell’s Inequalities with Amplified Entangled Coherent States” as a result of his visit to QTeQ in September-October 2012 in collaboration with Mauro and Gabriele. The poster was awarded for “clearly communicating exciting new developments in the field of Quantum Information, Quantum Control and Quantum Optics” at the Topical Research Meeting on Physics: Quantum Technologies: taking concepts through to implementations, 17-18 December 2012, Institute of Physics, London, UK. Bravo!


Double PRL hat-trick for QTeQ members!

Great news for QTeQ! Two group members have recently published two research papers in Phys. Rev. Lett., one of the premier journals in the Quantum Information and Quantum Optics field.

Andre’, together with Claudiu Genes and Aurelien Dantan, reported on the physics of a multi-membrane system in an optical cavity, for optomechanical applications. Gabriele, in collaboration with Luca Lepori, Maciej Lewenstein, and Anna Sanpera studied the entanglement spectrum of an exotic many-body system in relation to the critical properties of the model itself.

Full details on the works can be found at

A. Xuereb, C. Genes, and A. Dantan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 223601 (2012)

G. De Chiara, L. Lepori, M. Lewenstein, and A. Sanpera, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 237208 (2012)

At QTeQ, we are all delighted of this success, which is the perfect complement to a year that saw 6 papers from QTeQ members being published in Phys. Rev. Lett. and two upcoming Nature Scientific Reports papers!


QTeQ is awarded EPSRC funds for computing

QTeQ has just been awarded £ 10k to purchase two new high-performance machines as part of an EPSRC bid submitted by Queen’s University Belfast and open to the support of EPSRC-funded early-stage researchers (Mauro as Co-I). Every little helps, needless to say…


Jie publishes a paper with a leading experimental team in China

Jie and Mauro have just published a paper in Phys Rev A resulting from the collaboration with a leading experimental team in China working on cavity-QED. The work, which explores the possibility to transfer entanglement to the steady state of flying qubits from driven cavities, is the result of the interaction between QTeQ and Jie’s former group at the State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Opto-Electronics (Shanxi University,) led by Prof. Tiancai Zhang. Jie and Mr. Yanqiang Guo plaid a key role in this success and the credit should all go to them. Congrats, Jie!!

Details of the work can be found in

Yanqiang Guo, Jie Li, Tiancai Zhang, and Mauro Paternostro, Transferring entanglement to the steady state of flying qubits, Phys. Rev. A 86, 052315 (2012)


Dave Sandford wins Business Leadership award

Dave Sandford has been awarded a Business Leader of Tomorrow award from the Technology and Strategy Board.

Dave (PhD in Atmospheric Physics) is one of only 5 prize-winners from over 800 UK candidates in a national competition to find the best innovators and leaders in business within the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme.

Dave and Jim have developed, in partnership with Hughes Insurance (NI’s largest independent insurance broker), innovative applications of statistical physics and information theory to customer relations and company profitability. Hughes Insurance sponsors annual prizes for Undergraduate students in Mathematics and is supporting the new degree BSc in Mathematics with Finance at Queen’s.