CQT hosts international conference on quantum communication, measurement and computing

QCMC 2016 saw five days' discussion of quantum technologies on the campus of the National University of Singapore. View more photos online at the QCMC facebook page.

Some 300 scientists and students attended the International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing (QCMC) at the National University of Singapore, 4–8 July.

It was the 13th meeting in the series that brings together scientists and engineers working in the interdisciplinary field of quantum information science and technology

QCMC by numbers

Over five days, there were 31 invited talks, 21 contributed talks, 2 poster sessions featuring some 100 posters each, 5 poster awards, 1 visit to CQT and 1 conference dinner.

The conference featured special sessions on loophole-free tests of Bell nonlocality and on industrial efforts in quantum computing. Industry speakers came from Google, Microsoft, D-Wave Systems and the NTT Basic Research Laboratory.

Many of the talks were live-tweeted by members of the audience – find selected highlights in the slideshow below.

Staff at the Centre for Quantum Technologies managed the local organisation for the meeting. Valerio Scarani, CQT Principal Investigator, and Evon Tan, Senior Admin Manager, led the planning with help from a committee of their colleagues.

"We managed to keep the spirit of QCMC with a mixture of experimental and theoretical results, and we added here and there a touch of humour. As a sign of success, I'd mention only one indicator: the large number of people that were still present at the last session on Friday morning. We had scheduled attractive talks, but this can't explain everything: people just liked to hang around," said Valerio.

Lost in the multiverse

The touch of humour showed in the award announcement. CQT’s Director Artur Ekert was named one of two recipients of the 2016 Quantum Communication Award presented at QCMC 2016. Rainer Blatt from the University of Innsbruck in Austria was the other prize-winner. He gave an award talk on the final morning of the conference on "Quantum Information Processing with Trapped Ions and Photons".

Artur, on the other hand, couldn’t be there. He left two video messages instead – directed by CQT Principal Investigator Dagomir Kaszlikowski, with special effects by undergraduate Samson Tan – announcing his plans to teleport himself to the meeting, then trying it. Watch this one first, then this one:

The next QCMC will be held 12–16 March 2018 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Jonathan P. Dowling, Co-Director of the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics, is the lead organiser.