Title: The Quantum Information Revolution: How entanglement will — and won’t — enhance computing, communication, and sensing
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, November. 17, 2022
Where: Riley Auditorium, The Battelle Fine Arts Center, 170 W. Park St.

By now many people have probably heard about recent developments in quantum computing, teleportation, and the like. But what’s really going on, what’s hype, what’s promise, and what’s unknown? In this lecture Kwiat explains in simple terms some of the quantum “magic” we have at our disposal, why it helps, and when it probably won’t. He’ll discuss the quintessential phenomenon of quantum entanglement and, time permitting, give a brief lesson in quantum cooking.

Kwiat is the Bardeen Chair in Physics, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the inaugural Director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST). A Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, he has given invited talks at numerous national and international conferences and has authored over 160 articles on various topics in quantum optics and quantum information, including several review articles. His research focuses on optical implementations of quantum information protocols, particularly using entangled—and hyperentangled—photons from parametric down-conversion. He received the Optical Society of America 2009 R. W. Wood Prize, as the primary inventor of the world’s first sources of polarization-entangled photons from down-conversion, which have been used for quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, quantum metrology, and realizing optical quantum gates. Currently he leads the NASA JPL-funded Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment (SEAQUE), which is the first US-led quantum information space project.