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QCMC is over and the physics entourage has moved on to the ICAP conference in Cairns or back home. Watching all those talks has prompted me to share my thoughts on chairing a conference session. Here they are: 1. Your Speakers The job of a session chair is really not that hard. It therefore always […]

In 5 days the QCMC 2010 is taking off here in Brisbane. We’re looking forward to one week of exciting Science and free coffee.

Th French magazine “Pour la Science” has just reprinted the 2008 Seed magazine article “The Reality Tests” on our Vienna Leggett inequality experiments. The original experiment on a violation of the Leggett inequality by Simon Groeblacher and colleagues garnered a lot of attention. My modest contribution was to perform more conclusive measurements for an inequality […]

Here’s another entry in the list of bizarre uses for the word quantum. I’m eagerly awaiting a UPS delivery and was quite surprised to find that they offer a “Quantum View”: It even sports a “visibility”, which means it has to be good!

I’m in the process of preparing a talk on our recent quantum walk paper. On the search for inspiration for an introduction to the topic, I was looking for an image to explain (classic) random walks. Google’s image search did a reasonable job, returning these images as the first three results: Decent enough, but not […]

Our lab has had a good start into the year. First, our paper “Towards quantum chemistry on a quantum computer” appeared in Nature Chemistry. This work has received quite a lot of media attention, as chronicled by our lab website. A short time later, we published an experiment on quantum control, “Experimental feedback control of […]

George Monbiot has published an excellent article on deniers of man-made climate-change, “The Unpersuadables“. I myself like to occasionally spend some time in my local newspaper forums to convince people that climate change is both real and—at least partly—man-made. Maybe this exercise is futile; someone will always be wrong on the internet. But in the […]

Yesterday, I watched the second part of the BBC‘s “The race for absolute zero”, a 2007 documentary on the quest to reach zero temperature. I’m a big fan of the BBC and it’s documentaries and can thoroughly recommend “Absolute Zero”, which features eminent scientists such as Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared […]

We have just added a paper to the growing collection of experimental implementations of quantum walks. Quantum walks are the quantum analogue of random walks in the classical world. The theory of quantum walks has long been established, but only last year saw a number of decent experimental realizations, with neutral atoms, ions (here and […]

I have a new paper, “Information complementarity in quantum physics” on the ArXiv preprint server. We studied the distribution of information in a whole zoo of pure and mixed two-photon quantum states and demonstrate experimentally that local information is complementary to information stored in correlations. The paper contains the probably most extensive range of experimentally […]