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Last year saw the completion of a decade long quest to perform a successful Bell experiment without the three major and a few minor experimental loopholes. With local causality laid to rest, we can now start to unravel which of the many assumptions made by John Bell are incompatible with quantum mechanics. In a new experiment […]

This summer we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Ella Wyllie in our lab, via the Equate Scotland initiative. From their newsletter: EPS Equate Scotland students The school of Engineering and Physical Sciences is delighted to welcome three Equate Scotland summer students to the Heriot-Watt campus. The students are Ella Wyllie, an undergraduate at University of […]

We have a new paper on environmentally enhanced transport out in Nature Communications, “Enhancing coherent transport in a photonic network using controllable decoherence“. Here’s what Ivan and Andrew have to say about it: Quantum researchers find noise isn’t always bad A team of researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and […]

Google’s joint announcement with DWave has hit the airwaves and just as with the three previous generations DWave reports that their quantum annealer achieves significant speedups over classical algorithms. The good news IMO is that the scientific manuscript that underpins the press release is upfront about the main caveat, which is that the speedup all […]

An extraordinary event took place for the first time in the UK a couple of weeks ago: the UK National Quantum Technology Showcase 2015. According to the official announcement, this was “a unique opportunity to meet the four UK Quantum Technology Hubs – a consortium of 17 UK universities, and find out about the latest […]

Every time we write a manuscript for a bold abstract journal the broad readership question is asked. Will they understand? Journals like Nature encourage you to think that way. To help their authors’ out in this endeavour, Nature supplies an exemplary summary paragraph, which is that bold, fully-referenced oddity that replaces the abstract in a […]

Nobel laureate and super-determinism conspiracist Gerard ’t Hooft has an online guide on how to become a GOOD theoretical physicist. He lists required subjects and key concepts in each subject and links to mostly online resources for self-study of those concepts. I’ve always considered it a shame that there isn’t anything similar for experimental physicists. […]

The UK research council has now announced the outcome of their Quantum Technology Fellowship scheme. I’m one of ten academics to receive a 5-year grant for developing quantum technologies. My early-career fellowship is worth approximately £1.2M and I will use it to develop next-generation cluster photonics to be used in quantum communication, computation and imaging. […]

After seven years as a research fellow at the University of Queensland, it’s time for me to move on. On September 1, I will officially start a new quantum photonics group as Associate Professor at Heriot-Watt University in the wonderful city of Edinburgh, Scotland. This website will see a bit of a redesign accordingly. I’m offering a fully funded postdoc and […]