Quantum Technology at Queen's

Jader Pereira dos Santos, a PhD student from Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), joins QTeQ for 1 year to work under the support of the CNPq-funded “Science without Borders” project awarded to the group and Prof. Fernando Semiao (UFABC) . Bem vindo Jader!

Giacomo Torlai, final-year student at LMU (Munich), former summer student at QTeQ and frequent visitor, has published his first paper! The work, which is a collaboration with Gerard, Gabriele and Mauro, together with colleagues in Olomouc and Seoul, analyses the violation of Bell’s inequalities by entangled coherent states subjected to local rotations and heralded amplification. Details can be found at

G. Torlai, et al., Phys. Rev. A 87, 052112 (2013)

Jie’s newly published NJP paper

J. Li, S. Groeblacher, and M. Paternostro, “Enhancing non-classicality in mechanical systems“, New J. Phys. 15, 033023 (2013),

written in collaboration with Caltech, has been chosen by the IoP Editors to be part of the 2013 “IoP select” list! This collates articles from the last 12 months that have been chosen by the IoP Editors for their novelty, significance and potential impact on future research. Well done, Jie!!!

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 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!!

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)

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’!!

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.

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!

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!