Celebrating the graduation of CQT students

CQT graduates Debashis De Munshi (centre left) and Rakhitha Chandrasekara(centre right) celebrate with their supervisors, Principal Investigators Manas Mukherjee (left) and Alexander Ling (right) at the NUS Commencement on 11 July 2017.

In the past year, eleven students in the CQT programme have completed their PhD, making a novel contribution to the sum of human knowledge. They have also acquired learning and skills that they are now ready to bring into the next stage of their careers.

"It's a fantastic time to be working in quantum technologies," says CQT Director Artur Ekert. "Governments continue to see the value in supporting research in our field. At the same time, companies are expanding their quantum programs and we're seeing new startups. CQT's graduates will have many opportunities."

The class of 2017 includes students from disciplines spanning physics, computer science and engineering.

Rakhitha Chandrasekara, for example, graduated with an electronics and telecommunications degree back in 2010. He joined the group of Alexander Ling to work on control electronics for optical devices in nanosatellites – aiming towards a global quantum key distribution network. "It was a proud moment for me when an integrated photon pair source was demonstrated in low earth orbit in 2016," Rakhitha said. He won a best student paper award after presenting his work in 2016 at the SPIE Remote Sensing and Security + Defence Symposia.

CQT Principal Investigator Manas Mukherjee had a few students graduate this year, among them Tarun Dutta and Debashis De Munshi.

Manas said "Both students drove progress in my group's ion trap experiments. It's interesting to see that, with similar training on fundamental physics problems, they are looking towards different futures. Tarun would like a career in academia while Debashis is drawn towards industry, with a patent application from his lab work and many ideas for businesses."

In fact, a few days after collecting his degree scroll, Debashis accepted an offer from KLA Tencor, a multinational company that develops inspection and metrology technologies for the semiconductor and nanoelectronics industries. He will join the company's Singapore facility as a Manufacturing Design Engineer in September 2017. The role required education to Masters or PhD. Debashis was selected after three rounds of interviews in which he described how, at CQT, he helped to build and trouble-shoot experiments. "The biggest appeal for me," says Debashis, "is doing research in a more applied environment, to build machines that will be applied on a commercial scale."

Find a full list of this year's graduates and their theses below. We congratulate them all!

PhD Graduates, 2017

Rakhitha Chandrasekara
A Cubesat Compatible Electronics Platform For Miniaturized Single Photon Pair Sources
Supervised by Alexander Ling
CQT PhD Programme

Christian Gross
Atomic 2S1/2 to 3P3/2 Transition for Production and Investigation of A Fermionic Lithium Quantum Gas
Supervised by Kai Dieckmann
CQT PhD Programme

Corsin Pfister
Decoherence Estimation in Quantum Theory and Beyond
Supervised by Stephanie Wehner
CQT PhD Programme

Debashis De Munshi
Precision Measurements to Explore Underlying Geometries and Interactions in a Trapped Ba+ Ion
Supervised by Manas Mukherjee
CQT PhD Programme

Lam Mun Choong, Mark
Molecular Spectroscopy of Ultracold 6LI40K Molecules
Supervised by Kai Dieckmann
CQT PhD Programme

Sambit Bikas Pal
Molecular Spectroscopy of Ultracold 6Lithium – 40Potassium Molecules: Towards Stirap Transfer to Absolute Ground State<
Supervised by Kai Dieckmann
CQT PhD Programme

Supartha Podder
Exploring Different Models of Query Complexity and Communication Complexity
Supervised by Hartmut Klauck
CQT PhD Programme

Swarup Das
Application of Precision Measurements with Trapped Ion and Development of a Planar Surface Ion Trap Setup
Supervised by Manas Mukherjee
CQT PhD Programme

Tarun Dutta
Precision measurement to study strongly correlated systems-from a single ion to phonons in an ion chain
Supervised by Manas Mukherjee
CQT PhD Programme

Wei Nie
Gauge Fields and Geometric Phases in Periodic Systems
Supervised by Kwek Leong Chuan
CQT PhD Programme

Wu Xingyao
Self-Testing: Walking on the Boundary of the Quantum Set
Supervised by Valerio Scarani
CQT PhD Programme