Principles and applications of quantum control engineering

• Professor Klaus Mølmer, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor Matthew James, Australian National University, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor John Gough, Aberystwyth University, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

John Gough was born in Ireland in 1967, and completed a PhD in Mathematical Physics at University College Dublin in 1992. He has worked at the Volterra Centre in Rome, as well as the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and at Nottingham. He joined the Institute of Mathematics and Physics, Aberystwyth University in 2007, and is currently head of the Quantum Structures and Control group. His interests are in Mathematical Physics with specific emphasis on quantum open systems and quantum probability. This involves the description of quantum systems interacting with, or being measured by, their environment. In particular, this gives the mathematical formalism for describing quantum control. Together with Matthew James, he has developed the theory of quantum feedback networks which treats the interconnection of quantum open systems, and provides a basis for quantum feedback control. 

• Professor Hideo Mabuchi, Stanford University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Hideo Mabuchi, now Professor and Department Chair of Applied Physics at Stanford University, received an AB in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.  Current research interests span a range of topics from quantum engineering to molecular biophysics, with a general emphasis on developing new practical approaches to measurement, analysis and modeling of nonlinear stochastic systems. 

• Professor Ian Walmsley, University of Oxford, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor Alberto Barchielli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Audio recording (mp3)

Alberto Barchielli received the Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Milan in 1974. In the same University he was researcher in Theoretical Physics and associated professor in Mathematics. After one year at the University of Lecce, in 1995 he joined the Department of Mathematics of the Politecnico di Milano as full professor in Probability and Mathematical Statistics.

His scientific work has been always centred in the theory of quantum open systems and of quantum measurements. He took part in the construction of the theory of quantum measurements in continuous time and contributed to its mathematical developments, namely to connect this theory with quantum stochastic calculus and classical stochastic differential equations. He developed also applications to quantum optics and photo-detection theory. The actual researches concern the applications of the theory of measurements in continuous time to quantum information and the modifications needed to include feedback and nonMarkovian effects. 

• Professor Howard Wiseman, Griffith University, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Howard Wiseman has been working in quantum measurement and control for 20 years. In his PhD he applied quantum trajectory theory to the problem of quantum feedback, and this approach has become very widely used. As a postdoc he established adaptive quantum measurements as a vital research field, as it still is today, both theoretically and experimentally. He gained a QEII Fellowship on the topic of non-Markovian quantum trajectories, and most recently he held a Federation Fellowship, in the fields of quantum information, measurement, and control. He has over 150 journal papers, with more than 3700 citations, and with Gerard Milburn wrote Quantum Measurement and Control (Cambridge, 2010), the first comprehensive text on this subject. He has won the Bragg Medal of the Australian Institute of Physics, the Pawsey Medal of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and the Malcolm Macintosh Medal at the Prime Minister’s Science Awards. He has been Director of the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith University since 2007, and was elected as a Fellow of the AAS in 2008.

• Professor Andrew Doherty, University of Sydney, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

Andrew Doherty is a theoretical physicist with research interests in quantum control and quantum information. He holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. He received a BSc (Hons) in Physics from the University of Canterbury in 1995 and his PhD in quantum optics under the supervision of Professor Dan Walls at The University of Auckland in 2000. From 2000 to 2003 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and from 2003 to 2010 he was at School of Mathematics and Physics at The University of Queensland, most recently as Senior Lecturer. 

• Professor Klaus Mølmer, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor Herschel Rabitz, Princeton University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

 Herschel A Rabitz graduated from Harvard University in 1970, with a PhD degree in chemical physics. This was followed by post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin. In 1971, Professor Rabitz joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University, and from July, 1993 to July, 1996 was Chairman of the Department. He is also an affiliated member of Princeton's Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. Professor Rabitz's research interests lie at the interface of chemistry, physics, and engineering, with principal areas of focus including molecular dynamics, biophysical chemistry, chemical kinetics, and optical interactions with matter. An overriding theme throughout his research is the emphasis on molecular scale systems analysis. Professor Rabitz has over 780 publications in the general area of chemical physics.

• Professor Ian Walmsley, University of Oxford, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Dr Hendra Nurdin, Australian National University, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

Hendra Nurdin is an Australian Research Council Australian Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Engineering, The Australian National University. He received a PhD degree in Engineering and Information Science from the Australian National University in 2007. His research interests include quantum feedback control, and analysis and synthesis of quantum feedback networks.

• Professor Matthew James, Australian National University, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor John Gough, Aberystwyth University, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

John Gough was born in Ireland in 1967, and completed a PhD in Mathematical Physics at University College Dublin in 1992. He has worked at the Volterra Centre in Rome, as well as the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and at Nottingham. He joined the Institute of Mathematics and Physics, Aberystwyth University in 2007, and is currently head of the Quantum Structures and Control group. His interests are in Mathematical Physics with specific emphasis on quantum open systems and quantum probability. This involves the description of quantum systems interacting with, or being measured by, their environment. In particular, this gives the mathematical formalism for describing quantum control. Together with Matthew James, he has developed the theory of quantum feedback networks which treats the interconnection of quantum open systems, and provides a basis for quantum feedback control. 

• Professor Hideo Mabuchi, Stanford University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Hideo Mabuchi, now Professor and Department Chair of Applied Physics at Stanford University, received an AB in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.  Current research interests span a range of topics from quantum engineering to molecular biophysics, with a general emphasis on developing new practical approaches to measurement, analysis and modeling of nonlinear stochastic systems. 

• Professor Ian Petersen, University of New South Wales, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

Ian R Petersen was born in Victoria, Australia. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1984 from the University of Rochester. From 1983 to 1985 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University. In 1985 he joined the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy where he is currently Scientia Professor and an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Systems and Control Letters, Automatica, and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Currently he is an Editor for Automatica. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the Australian Academy of Sciences.  His main research interests are in robust control theory, quantum control theory and stochastic control theory.  

• Dr Madalin Guta, Nottingham University, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Madalin Guta is lecturer at the School of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Nottingham. He obtained his PhD in 2002 from the University of Nijmegen. The key results of his thesis [Commun Math Phys 229, 209 (2002), J Funct Anal 191, 241 (2002)] concern the characterisation of non-commutative analogues of the Brownian motion in terms of generalised Fock space representations. As a postdoctoral fellow at EURANDOM Eindhoven, and at the Mathematical Institute in Utrecht, he worked with Richard Gill on the statistical theory of non-parametric quantum state estimation [J Royal Stat Soc Ser B 67, 109 (2005), Ann Statist 35, 465 (2007)], and the theory of stochastic Schrödinger equations [J Phys A, 37, 3189 (2004)]. As a VENI Fellow of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) he worked on a non-commutative extension of the key statistical concept of local asymptotic normality, which was further developed in [Commun Math Phys 276, 341 (2007); 277, 127 (2008); 289, 597 (2009)] and used in designing optimal state estimation procedures.  As an EPSRC Fellow his current research focuses on the study of statistical and probabilistic aspects of quantum Markov dynamics eg quantum Central Limit, Large Deviations and local asymptotic normality, and applications to quantum system identification and quantum control [Phys Rev A 83 062324 (2011)].   

• Professor Lorenza Viola, Dartmouth College, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Lorenza Viola obtained a "Laurea" (Master) degree in Physics from the University of Trento, Italy, in 1991, and a PhD in Physics from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1996.  After helding a postdoctoral appointment with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2000, she has been a JR Oppenheimer Fellow with the Computer and Computational Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2004, she joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College.

Dr Viola's research has addressed a broad range of issues within theoretical quantum information physics, with emphasis on modeling and control of complex quantum-dynamical systems.  In particular, she has been a key contributor to the development of error-control techniques for open quantum systems based on dynamical decoupling methods, and a proposer of the notion of a noiseless subsystem as a general pathway to protected realizations of information in physical systems.  Dr Viola has co-authored so far about 100 papers in international journals and peer-reviewd volumes.  She is a board member of the "International Physics and Control Society".  She has also served on the editorial board of "Physical Review A" and as the Chair of the Topical Group on Quantum Information of the American Physical Society.

• Dr Naoki Yamamoto, Keio University, Japan
• Audio recording (mp3)

Naoki Yamamoto received the BS in engineering, MS, and PhD degrees in Information Physics and Computing from University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1999, 2001, and 2004, respectively. From 2004 to 2006 he was a visiting researcher at California Institute of Technology, USA, and from 2007 to 2008 he was a research fellow at the Australian National University, Australia. He is currently an Associate Professor at Keio University, Yokohama, Japan.  

• Dr Daniel Oi, Strathclyde University, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dr Daniel Oi is a Lecturer in Quantum Information at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. After first degrees in Physics and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Western Australia, he did post-graduate study in Cambridge before completing a DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Prof Artur Ekert in 2002. He has worked on a diverse range of topics such as geometric phase, quantum channels and coherence, quantum cryptography, non-locality, fault-tolerance/scalability, and implementations of quantum information processing, the latter leading to the development of quantum system characterisation for quantum control.