Event Program -
Friday June 11th, 2021

8:45

Opening Remarks

8:50

Pr Mathieu Juan, Institut quantique - Université de Sherbrooke
Clasical and quantum computations as tensor networks

9:35

Pr Stefanos Kourtis, Institut quantique - Université de Sherbrooke
Classical and quantum computations as tensor networks

10:20

Break

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Equity, Diversity and inclusion activity

Event organized in collaboration with the RQMP and animated by Mrs. Chloé Freslon, founder of URelles

10:30

Falisha Karpati, Ph.D.
Think Differently Together: Strengthening research and innovation by embracing cognitive diversity

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Short presentation from recent INTRIQ members

11:30

Louis-Philippe Lamoureux (Slides / Présentation)

11:45

Thierry Debuischert, Thales - France (postponed to Monday at 13:15 / reporté à lundi 13h15)

12:00

Closing remarks of the day

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Event Program -
Monday, June 14th, 2021

13:10

Opening remark of the day

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Short presentation from recent INTRIQ members

13:15

Thierry Debuischert, Thales - France

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Invited Speakers

13:30

Professor Tami Pereg-Barnea, McGill University
Dynamic topology - quantized conductance and Majoranas on wires

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14:15

Professor Philippe St-Jean, Université de Montréal
Topological physics with light and matter: new horizons

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15:00

Break

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Short Presentation from recent INTRIQ Members

13:10

Louis Gaudreau, National Research Council Canada (Ottawa)
Entanglement distribution via coherent photon-to-spin conversion in semiconductor quantum dot circuits

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15:25

Philippe Lamontagne, National Research Council Canada (Montréal)
Black-Box Impossibility in the Common Reference Quantum State Model‍

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15:40

Olivier Gagnon-Gordillo, Québec quantique lead
Presentation of the Québec Quantum ecosystem

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Invited Speakers

Professor Stefanos Kourtis

Institut quantique - Université de Sherbrooke

Classical and quantum computations as tensor networks

Tensor networks are multilinear-algebra data structures that are finding application in diverse fields of science, from quantum many-body physics to artificial intelligence. I will introduce tensor networks and illustrate how they can be used to represent classical and quantum computations. I will then motivate tensor network algorithms that perform or simulate computations in practice and demonstrate their performance on benchmarks of current interest, such as model counting and quantum circuit simulation. I will close with an outline of ongoing work and an outlook on future directions.

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Professor Mathieu Juan

Institut quantique - Université de Sherbrooke

Optomechanics with a non-linear cavity

The possibility to operate massive mechanical oscillators close to or in the quantum regime has become central in fundamental sciences. LIGO is a prime example where quantum states of light are now used to further improve the sensitivity. Concretely, optomechanics relies on the use of photons to control the mechanical motion of a resonator, providing a path toward quantum states of massive objects and for the development of quantum sensors. In order to improve this control many approaches have been explored, some more complicated than others. In particular, in order to cool the mechanical motion a cavity can be used to realise side-band cooling. In general, linear cavities are favoured to allow for large photon number providing stronger cooling. I will show that, surprisingly, non-linear cavities can be used to achieve very efficient cooling at low powers. Indeed, even in the bad cavity limit, we have been able to cool a mechanical resonator from 4000 thermal phonons down 11 phonons. Currently limited by flux noise, this approach opens promising opportunities to achieve quantum control of massive resonators, an avenue to study foundational questions.

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Professor Tami Pereg-Barnea

McGill University

Dynamic topology - quantized conductance and Majoranas on wires

This talk will address the issue of out-of-equilibrium topological systems.  While many materials and devices produced in labs today are topological at equilibrium, it is desirable to have a knob to tune or induce topological properties.  For example, if we could dynamically turn a superconductor into a topological superconductor we may create the sought after Majorana fermions which are potential building blocks of quantum bits.  
In this context we will explore the possibility of perturbing quantum systems using time-periodic fields (i.e., radiation) and use the Floquet theory to characterize the driven states.  We find that in topological systems, beyond the expected splitting of the spectrum into side bands, a change in the topology may occur.  In the case of a topological superconductor, the driven system may develop new Majorana modes which do not exist at equilibrium and can be exchanged on a single wire.  A protocol for exchanging Majoranas will be presented.

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Professor Philippe St-Jean

Université de Montréal

Topological physics with light and matter: new horizons

Topology is a branch of mathematics interested in geometric properties that are invariant under continuous deformation, e.g. the number of holes in an object. In the early 1980s it was demonstrated that similar topological properties can be defined for solids presenting appropriate symmetry elements. The discovery of these topological phases of matter has profoundly impacted our understanding of condensed matter, its influence ranging from better explaining the universality of the conductivity plateaus in the quantum Hall effect to developing new platforms for fault-tolerant quantum computation[i]. In the late 2000s, Duncan Haldane (co-laureate of the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of topological phases of matter) demonstrated that this topological physics is not restricted to condensed matter but can also emerge in artificial systems like photonic crystals through a careful engineering of their symmetry properties[ii]. Since then, these photonics platforms have proven to be an amazing resource for pushing the exploration of topological matter beyond what is physically reachable in the solid-state, leading to the emergence of a blooming field called topological photonics[iii].
In this presentation, I will describe recent experimental works based on exciton-polaritons, a hybrid light-matter quasiparticle, which have opened new horizons in topological photonics[iv]. The main advantages of polaritonic systems arise from their dual nature: their photonic part allows for tailoring well-defined topological properties in lattices of coupled microcavities and makes them inherently non-hermitian; on the other hand, their matter part gives rise to a strong Kerr-like nonlinearity and to lasing[v]. I will then discuss in more details a recent work in which we took profit of these assets to experimentally extract topological invariants - a fundamental quantity in topology - in a polaritonic analog of graphene[vi]. Importantly, this has allowed us to directly probe the topological phase transition occurring in a critically strained lattice - i.e. where Dirac cones have merged - a condition impossible to reach in the solid-state. I will conclude this presentation by discussing how topological protection can provide a powerful asset for generating and stabilizing many-body quantum states of light and matter. Such mesoscopic quantum objects are highly desirable as they would provide an extended playground for quantum simulation, sensing applications or for generating exotic states of light such as many-body entangled states[vii].
[i] M. Z. Hasan and C. L. Kane. Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 3045 (2010)
[ii] F. D. M. Haldane and S. Raghu. Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 013904 (2008)
[iii] T. Ozawa et al. Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 015006 (2019)
[iv] D. D. Solnyshkov, G. Malpuech, P. St-Jean et al. Opt. Mat. Express 11, 1119 (2021)
[v] I. Carusotto and C. Ciuti. Rev. Mod. Phys. 85, 299 (2013)
[vi] P. St-Jean et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 127403 (2021)
[vii] P. Lodahl et al. Nature 541, 473 (2017)

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EDI invited speaker

Falisha Karpati, Ph.D.

Think Differently Together: Strengthening research and innovation by embracing cognitive diversity

This talk will cover:

• What cognitive diversity is and how it contributes to academic excellence;
• The brain and behavioural correlates of different thinking styles;
• Strategies for creating research environments where all types of thinkers can thrive.
  

Biography

Falisha Karpati, PhD is a neuroscientist turned inclusion consultant. Falisha’s work focuses on using neuroscience to build inclusive environments in academic, research, and scientific organizations. Her approach to inclusion centres on the interconnectedness of cognitive, demographic, and experiential diversity. Prior to starting her consultancy practice, she worked as the Training and Equity Advisor for Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives at McGill University.

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Short presentation from recent INTRIQ members

Thierry Debuisschert

Head of Applied Quantum Physics
Thales Research & Technology

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Louis Gaudreau

Researcher
National Research Council Canada (Ottawa)

Entanglement distribution via coherent photon-to-spin conversion in semiconductor quantum dot circuits

In this talk, I will present our proposed long distance entanglement distribution scheme that aims to overcome fundamental limitations present in current optical schemes. By using direct band gap semiconductor quantum dots, efficiency and heralding advantages can be exploited through photon-to-spin conversion. For this reason, materials such as GaAs are superior to Si in this type of applications. I will review current schemes to transfer polarization or time-bin encoded photonic qubits to electron spin qubits and will describe adaptations to employ heavy holes which have a number of attractive properties including g-factor tunability. Finally, I will show preliminary results on quantum dot devices using Van der Waals heterostructures which present several potential advantages such as higher confinement energies due to their atomically thin geometry, easier combination with different substrates and the possibility of encoding information in their valley degree of freedom.

Biography

Louis Gaudreau studied physics at Sherbrooke University, followed by a masters and PhD in co-supervision with Andrew Sachrajda at NRC and Alexandre Blais at Sherbrooke. During his graduate studies, Louis studied electrostatic quantum dots and realized for the first time a coupled triple quantum dot system leading to the investigation of the first exchange-only qubit. During this period he was invited to perform quantum dot experiments in Stefans Ludwig’s group at LMU in Munich. After his PhD, Louis changed fields and studied light-matter interactions by combining quantum emitters and graphene to create different hybrid systems. These experiments were done during his postdoc at ICFO in Barcelona in the nano-opto-electronics group with Frank Koppens where he was awarded the prestigious Marie-Curie fellowship. Finally, since 2015, Louis has worked as research officer at the NRC where he investigates different technologies linked to quantum information.

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Philippe Lamontagne

Researcher
National Research Council Canada (Montréal)

Black-Box Impossibility in the Common Reference Quantum State Model

We explore the cryptographic power endowed by arbitrary shared physical resources. We introduce the Common Reference Quantum State (CRQS) model, where the parties involved share a fresh entangled state at the outset of each protocol execution. This model is a natural generalization of the well-known Common Reference String (CRS) model but appears to be more powerful. In the two-party setting, a CRQS can sometimes exhibit properties associated with a Random Oracle queried once. We formalize this notion as a Weak One-Time Random Oracle (W1TRO), where we only ask of the output to have some randomness when conditioned on the input is still beyond the reach of the CRQS model. We prove that the security of W1TRO cannot be black-box reduced to any assumption that can be framed as a cryptographic game. Our impossibility result employs the simulation paradigm formalized by Wichs (ITCS ’13) and has implications for other cryptographic tasks.
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- There is no universal implementation of the Fiat-Shamir transform whose security can be black-box reduced to a cryptographic game assumption. This extends the impossibility result of Bitansky et al. (TCC ’13) to the CRQS model.
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- We impose severe limitations on constructions of quantum lightning (Zhandry, Eurocrypt ’19). If a scheme allows n lightning states’ serial numbers (of length m such that n > m) to be combined in such a way that the outcome has entropy, then it implies W1TRO, and thus cannot be black-box reduced to a cryptographic game assumption.

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Louis-Philippe Lamoureux

Senior Product Manager
Aspen Technology

(Slides /  Présentation)

Biography

Montreal-based quantum physicist, senior product manager, and full stack developer with strong experience building award-winning hardware and software products. Currently Senior Product Manager at Aspen Technology leading connectivity and AI inference at the Edge. Prior to Aspen Technology, I worked at Machine-To-Machine Intelligence (M2Mi) a leader in IoT Security and Management located at NASA Ames research center in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Prior to M2Mi, built SQR Technologies a belgian quantum based, hardware security startup that pioneered distributed quantum key generation. Acquired by IDQ (Switzerland). Awarded a Ph.D. in Physics (Quantum Cryptography) from the University of Brussels. Research interests include: quantum cloning, experimental quantum cryptography, quantum noise reduction, and quantum random number generation.