Portable Quantum Dot Measurement System
Summary Detecting heavy metals in water is essential to ensure clean drinking water and appropriate regulatory decisions following an accident (e.g., a spill) or an emergency. Traditionally, high-sensitivity detection of heavy metals requires bulky and costly (to purchase and operate) lab-based instruments. We propose developing a palm-sized, element-specific, highly-sensitive, battery-operated, smartphone-controlled system for on-site measurement […]
July 21, 2022
New research opens the book on entangled qubits
Friday, September 3 Researchers have developed a new way to measure how quantum information behaves in correlated quantum systems that could be useful for understanding and improving quantum devices and quantum error correction codes. “We are all excited about the potential of quantum entanglement for quantum information processing,” said Mohamad Niknam, who was a […]
September 7, 2021
Repurposing potential drug candidates for the treatment of COVID-19
Summary The main protease (Mpro) in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has emerged as a promising drug target. The scientific community has produced a large number of crystallographic structures of the protease, which mediates viral replication and transcription. These structures report several fragments with varied chemotypes […]
May 6, 2020
Tuning Spin-Exchange Interactions in Low-Dimensional Metal Halide Perovskites: A New Class of Semiconductor Quantum Materials
Summary Leakage current in electronic components is one of the limiting factors for the performance of conventional computers which use charges and currents as physical information carriers. Spintronics offers an alternative by using electron spin for information transfer, processing and storage, enabling the design of non-volatile computer memory and more energy-efficient electronic devices. In this […]
October 1, 2019
Quantum Simulations of Fundamental Interactions
Summary To address questions in modern physics such as “what is the structure of matter inside neutron stars?” we need better computational methods to evaluate the interplay of fundamental forces between elementary particles. To-date the response to such questions rests on numerical computer simulations that are inherently limited. In this project, we develop new theoretical […]
April 18, 2019
Silicon Platform for Electron Spin Qubits
Summary Scaling solid-state quantum processors to a useful threshold while maintaining the requisite precision in quantum control remains a challenge. We propose a quantum metal-oxide-semiconductor (QMOS) architecture operating at cryogenic temperatures that is based on a network/node approach as a means to scalability. By working with QMOS, we benefit from the deep investments and […]
December 7, 2018
Ultrafast Dynamical Studies of Valley-Based Qubits
Summary As monolayers, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) – such as tungsten diselenide (WSe2) – become direct-bandgap semiconductors capable of emitting light. Compared to conventional direct-bandgap semiconductors, such as III-V semiconductors like GaAs, excitons (quasiparticles made of an electron hole bound with an electron) and single-layer TMDCs (SL-TMDCs) have much stronger binding energy. Excitons and […]
June 29, 2018
Waterloo chemists create faster and more efficient way to process information
Friday, May 11, 2018 University of Waterloo chemists have found a much faster and more efficient way to store and process information by expanding the limitations of how the flow of electricity can be used and managed. In a recently released study, the chemists discovered that light can induce magnetization in certain semiconductors – the standard […]
May 14, 2018
Plasmon Control of Quantum States in Semiconductor Nanocrystals
Summary Thanks to the light-induced collective oscillations of free charges at the boundary between a conducting material and a dielectric, known as surface plasmon resonance, metallic nanostructures can exhibit strong light absorption and scattering. The sensitivity of these resonances to the local environment and shape of the metallic structures allows them to be used, […]
March 21, 2018
A new way to use neutrons
Monday, March 12, 2018 Novel neutron interferometry technique is more powerful and practical. Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), in collaboration with researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), have developed a neutron interferometry technique that is more powerful, robust and practical than […]
March 12, 2018
Principal Investigator, TQT
October 24, 2017
Two-Dimensional Quantum Materials and Heterostructures
Two-dimensional (2D) layers just one atom thick can be stripped from certain materials, such as graphene.
June 1, 2017
Quantum Information Processing with Molecular Lattices
The aim of the work is to develop theoretical tools to simulate and predict the behaviour of a one-dimensional chain of trapped dipolar molecules and to study the nature of entanglement as a design resource.
June 1, 2017
Quantum Sensing with Small Quantum Systems
Summary There are small quantum systems over which we have very good control and which have long lifetimes. Examples include the phosphorous (P) defect in silicon (Si) and the nitrogen vacancy (NV) defect in diamond. With P defect in Si, we focus on improving our understanding of the hyperpolarization mechanism to better enable engineering of […]
December 1, 2016
Entangled States of Beams and their Applications
Summary With David Cory and collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) we explore how to engineer beams of neutron or photons that carry entanglement. The degrees of freedom that can be entangled include spin (polarization), momentum, displacement, and angular momentum. These have potential applications ranging from studies of helical internal magnetic fields […]
September 7, 2016
Quantum Dynamics of Cavity Interactions with Spin Ensembles
Summary High quality factor cavities can be powerful control elements for ensembles of spins, enabling unitary control as well as on demand cooling. They can also be used to couple two otherwise non-interacting ensembles. The goal of the project is to explore the physics and engineering of such systems both theoretically and experimentally. The laboratory contains a […]
September 7, 2016
Mesoscopic systems as coherent control elements
Summary Mesoscopic systems provide a new tool for quantum systems design. In particular, they are enabling of robust quantum control. Here “mesoscopic system” refers to a connected network where each element, if studied alone, would be a quantum bit. The network is too big to be treated fully quantum mechanically. We do not have individual […]
September 1, 2016