Title: “Quantum Information: a scientific and technological revolution for the 21st century”

Speaker: Professor William D Phillips, Nobel Laureate

Date: Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Time: 2pm until 4pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre D,Glyndwr Building, Swansea University

Admission: Free of charge and all welcome. Refreshments will be provided.

Seminar information: Two of the great scientific and technical revolutions of the 20th century were the discovery of the quantum nature of the submicroscopic world, and the advent of information science and engineering.  Both of these have had a profound effect not only on our daily lives but on our worldview. 

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we see a marriage of quantum mechanics and information science in a new revolution: quantum information. 

Quantum computation and quantum communication are two aspects of this revolution.

The first is highly speculative: a new paradigm more different from today’s digital computers than those computers are from the ancient abacus. The second is already a reality, providing information transmission whose security is guaranteed by the laws of physics. 

The JQI/NIST Laser Cooling and Trapping Group is studying the use of single, ultracold atoms as quantum bits, or qubits, for quantum information processing.

Speaker information: Professor William D Phillips is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. 

He conducted seminal work in laser cooling and trapping of gaseous atoms, with which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu.  

Among the various impacts, the development of laser-cooling techniques has enabled the creation of atomic fountain and atomic optical lattices in laboratories for making the most accurate clock in the world.

Professor Phillips is a fluent speaker of science to public. He is of Italian and Welsh descent.

For further information about this event, please contact Dr Saijun Wu, Department of Physics, College of Science, Swansea University, Tel:  01792 602294, or email: saijun.wu@swansea.ac.uk.