Seminar

Brian J. Anderson, Ph.D., is director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Anderson manages the complete NETL complex, including delivery and execution of the Laboratory’s mission, and national programs in fossil energy. Anderson came to NETL from West Virginia University (WVU) where he served as the director of the WVU Energy Institute. He has a long history of collaboration with NETL and other DOE national laboratories. He served NETL as the coordinator of the International Methane Hydrate Reservoir Simulator Code Comparison study and in...

In the race to show quantum advantage, early Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices must be compared to the state-of-the-art classical technology currently available. At the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab (QuAIL) at NASA Ames, we are continuously developing new classical algorithms to benchmark/validate quantum hardware and to raise the bar to claim quantum advantage. In my talk, I will present our optimized classical simulator for large quantum circuits, including numerical simulations of the Google Bristlecone quantum processing unit.

Trapped ions are one of the leading candidates for realizing practically useful quantum computers. Introduction of advanced integration technologies to this traditional atomic physics research has provided an opportunity to convert a complex atomic physics experiment into a stand-alone programmable quantum computer. In this presentation, I will discuss the new enabling technologies that changes the perception of a trapped ion system as a scalable quantum computer, and the concrete progress made to date in this endeavor. I will also discuss potential application areas where quantum...

Publishing the results of one’s research is an integral part of the scientific process, yet scholarly journals are often seen as black boxes by researchers. What happens to a paper after it is submitted? Who is deciding on its fate? What is the role of the journal editor and the editorial office? How does the peer-review process work, and are its core principles still relevant in today’s changing publishing landscape? 
In this talk I will discuss these questions in an attempt to de-mystify the peer review process from an editor's perspective, and provide advice for getting your...

This presentation will discuss the applications of the phase-field method to understanding and discovering new mesoscale polar states that might emerge from nanoscale ferroelectric heterostructures subject to different mechanical and electric boundary conditions. As an example, the determination of thermodynamic conditions and geometric length scales leading to the formation of ordered polar vortex lattice as well as mixed states of regular domains and vortices in ferroelectric superlattices of PbTiO 3 /SrTiO 3 using phase-field simulations and analytical theory will be presented. Switching of these vortex lattice states might produce other transient polar states such as polar skyrmions. It is shown that the stability of these vortex lattices involves an intimate competition between long-range electrostatic, long-range elastic,
and short-range polarization gradient-related interactions leading to both an upper- and a lower- bound to the length scale at which these states can be observed. We further predicted the periodicity phase diagrams that show excellent agreements with experimental observations by collaborators.

Phase-change materials have been used commercially as an optical storage medium in the last few decades owing to their high optical contrast and long-term stability, but only recently has a fully integrated photonic device been demonstrated. This approach not only enables all-optical memory on-chip, but also allows multilevel data storage with improved SNR, low switching energy, and high speed operation. In this talk, an overview of integrated, non-volatile photonic memory based on the phase-change material Ge₂Sb₂Te₅ (GST) will be presented, together with...

The UBEC conference series addresses broad themes of BEC that cross through all types of condensates, including cold atoms, helium and hydrogen, superconductors, quasiparticle condensation, photons and lasing, and condensation in nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology.

The conference will begin with an evening reception Sunday, March 31, and end Friday, April 5, at 3:00 pm. Talks will begin Monday, April 1, promptly at 9:00 am. There will be a poster session on Tuesday, April 2, and conference excursions on the afternoon of Thursday, April 4. The conference banquet will be ...

The ability to engineer controllable atom-photon interactions is at the heart of quantum optics and quantum information processing. In this talk, I will introduce a nanophotonic platform for engineering strong atom-photon interactions on a semiconductor chip. I will first discuss an experimental demonstration of a spin-photon quantum transistor [1], a fundamental building block for quantum repeaters and quantum networks. The device allows a single spin trapped inside a semiconductor quantum dot to switch a single photon, and vice versa, a single photon to flip the spin. I will discuss how...

Dirac discovered that every fundamental particle must also have a distinct anti-particle which has the opposite charge. When particles and anti-particles meet, they annihilate each other releasing energy. In 1937, Ettore Majorana predicted the existence of a special class of particles where the particle and the anti-particle are identical. However, with the possible exception of neutrinos, so far there are no known fundamental particles that belong to this class. Recently, the possible realization of these exotic Majorana fermions as quasiparticle excitations in in solids has created much...