Quantum Seminar

Abstract:  When the information carrier is a quantum-mechanical medium, such as photons or atomic systems--be it naturally occurring or an engineered system--that information can be processed (or computed upon) in fundamentally more powerful ways compared with a classical computer processing classically-represented information. This has implications in many applications, including more powerful laser-communications receivers, higher-resolution sensors that include telescopes, surface topography instruments, magnetic field sensors for imaging neuronal firing patterns, fluorescence microscopes for cellular imaging, fiber-optic gyroscopes and more, quantum computers that can solve certain problems inaccessible by classical machine or help accelerate certain computations, and various secure multiparty computations whose security is premised by the laws of physics. A large swath of engineering, scientific and social-science disciplines must converge to bring these technologies to fruition, to create significant societal impact. In this seminar, I will give a broad overview of the field of engineered quantum systems for enhanced information processing, and discuss a few illustrative examples from communications, sensing, imaging and computing. I will end with an overview of the Center for Quantum Networks, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center (ERC), which is a 10-year multi-institution research project aimed at architecting the quantum internet by developing andintegrating all the underlying technologies, algorithms and associated protocols. 

Bio:  Saikat Guha is the Director of the NSF-ERC Center for Quantum Networks and the Peyghambarian Endowed Chair Professor of Optical Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2002, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2017, he worked at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he was a member of the founding team of the Quantum Information Processing group. He leads various federally sponsored projects in topics surrounding quantum-enhanced photonic information processing, and quantum networking.