I've been on a bit of an unannounced hiatus for the last three weeks. This wasn't because I was intentionally avoiding blogging, but rather because since Easter I've either been snowed under or on holiday.
One of the major blogging killers of the last three weeks was the IQING conference that I was running here in Innsbruck. Unfortunately, as an organizer I felt a bit left-out of the scientific side of the conference. I only had time to make it to a few sessions, and in those I was either the chairperson or I was busy trying to work out very interesting things like how much coffee needed to be bought for the next coffee break.
Luckily though, I did get to go to a few really high quality talks. The ones that really stood out for me were:
- Joe Renes' introductory tutorial on quantum communication and cryptography.
- Marcus Cramer's tutorial on quantum dynamics.
- David Gross's talk on using the matrix product state formalism to find new families of quantum states that are universal for one-way quantum computing.
- Konrad Kieling's talk about the relationship percolation and cluster-state generation (a special mention should go to Konrad for carrying on superbly after we had a little IT meltdown which was in no way his fault).
- Daniel Burgath on quantum state transfer through spin chains.
- Christian Burrell on Lieb-Robinson bounds in certain disordered Hamiltonian systems.
- Richard Low on quantum algorithms for Fourier Transforms on SU(2).
- Ashley Montanaro's talk on establishing lower bounds on the entanglement-assisted quantum communication complexity.
There are probably a few other talks that I've forgotten, so apologies if I have forgotten anything.
