Dr. Andrei Faraon is a Professor of Applied Physics at California Institute of Technology. After earning a B.S. degree in physics with honors in 2004 at California Institute of Technology, he received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Applied Physics both from Stanford University in 2009. At Stanford, Dr. Faraon was involved with seminal experiments on quantum optics using single indium arsenide quantum dots strongly coupled to photonic crystal cavities in gallium arsenide. After earning his PhD, Dr. Faraon spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. At HP he was involved with pioneering experiments on diamond quantum photonic devices coupled to solid-state spins. He demonstrated the first nano-resonators coupled to single nitrogen vacancy centers in mono-crystalline diamond. Faraon left HP in 2012 to become an Assistant Professor at Caltech, where he set up a laboratory specialized in developing nano-photonic technologies for devices that operate close to the fundamental limit of light-matter interaction. He is focused both on fundamental challenges on how to control the interaction between single atoms and single photons using nano-technologies, and on using nano-photonics to build cutting edge devices for imaging and sensing. He is the recipient of the 2018 Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society of America, 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 2015 Air Force Office of Scientific Research young investigator award and the 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

Speech Title: Quantum Nano-Photonic Devices Based on Rare-Earth Ions

Julien Laurat is Professor at Sorbonne Université, Paris, and he’s leading a research group in Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Science at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel. After earning an engineering degree in Photonics, he received his PhD in 2004 at LKB on the generation of continuous-variable entanglement and worked then for one year at Institut d’Optique on quantum state engineering with femtosecond pulses. From 2005 to 2007, he held a postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology, where he developed quantum repeater primitives based on atomic ensembles. At LKB, his group focuses on experimental and theoretical researches to develop the scientific and technical abilities for the realization of quantum networks. His works includes the development of efficient interfaces between light and cold atoms for quantum data storage, the generation, characterization and manipulation of non-classical states of light, and the implementation of networking protocols using these resources. This research involves fundamental and more applied studies in quantum optics, non-linear optics, cold atoms, photon detection and nanophotonics. In 2012, he was elected to the Institut Universitaire de France and was awarded a Starting grant from the European Research Council.

Speech Title: Highly-efficient ensemble-based quantum memory for light

Tracy Northup is the Ingeborg Hochmair Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.  Her group’s research explores quantum interfaces between light and matter, focusing on trapped-ion and cavity-based interfaces for quantum networks and quantum optomechanics. Tracy received her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2008.  She then held an appointment as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Innsbruck, where she was the recipient of a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship and an Elise Richter Fellowship.  She became an assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck in 2015 and has been a full professor since 2017.  Notable research results include experimental demonstrations of ion-photon entanglement and quantum state transfer in an optical cavity, as building blocks for future quantum network nodes.  In 2016, she received the START Prize, the highest Austrian award for young scientists, from the Austrian Science Fund.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Nicolas Sangouard studied physics at the University of Burgundy in Dijon where he did a PhD in the framework of coherent control. He did a postdoc in quantum optics with M. Fleischhauer in Kaiserslautern in 2005 and also with N. Gisin in Geneva in 2006. In 2007, he obtained a Maitre de Conferences position at the University Paris VII. Returning to Geneva in 2009, he headed the theoretical activities related to quantum optics in N. Gisin’s group, while on leave from his permanent position. He received a professorship from the Swiss National Foundation in 2014, which he is using to run an independent research group at the Department of Physics, in the University of Basel. Notable research results include theoretical proposals for implementing and certifying quantum networks. On the fundamental side, he made proposals to create and detect quantum features in macroscopic systems. He is the recipient a Carnot Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and the co-recipient of the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations in 2017. 

Speech Title: Trustworthy certifications of quantum communication technologies

Pascale Senellart is a senior CNRS researcher working in the field in solid-state quantum optics.  Her group, at the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology – CNRS – University Paris Saclay,  studies and develops semiconductor devices for optical quantum technologies : single photon sources, single photon non-linearities, spin-photon interfaces and nanoacoustic cavities. Pascale received her Ph.D. from the University Paris 6 in 2001 and joined the CNRS end of 2002 after two short postdoctoral positions in industrial laboratories. In 2008, she invented a technology to fully control the coupling between a single quantum dot and a microcavity, a technique that allows her team to address many interesting challenges in the field of solid-state quantum optics. She has co-authored 140 papers in refereed journals and given more than 120 invited talks in international conferences and workshops. She was awarded of an ERC consolidator grant in 2011, received the CNRS silver medal in 2014 and was elected OSA Fellow in 2018. In 2017, she cofounded Quandela, a spin-off company specialized in single photon sources.

Speech Title: Pure quantum light generation in the solid state

Christine Silberhorn is a professor at Paderborn University, where she is leading a research group in the area of integrated quantum optics. Her interests cover novel optical technologies based on non-linear integrated devices including their fabrication and tailoring for new applications, and the exploration of ultrafast pulsed light as well as of time multiplexed quantum networks. She has contributed to the development of engineered quantum light sources and circuits using integrated optics and ultrafast pulsed lasers, the implementation of multichannel quantum networks for photon counting and quantum simulations, and the realization of quantum communication systems with bright light. She received her doctorate from the University of Erlangen in 2003, and worked as a postdoc at the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2004. From 2005 to 2010 she was a Max Planck Research Group Leader in Erlangen. Her research work has been awarded by several prizes; most prominently she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-prize from the German Science Foundation in 2011 and a consolidator ERC-grant in 2017. In 2013 she has been elected as a member of the Leopoldina, National Academy of Science, and in 2018 as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

Speech Title: Quantum networks based on integrated optics and pulsed light

Leticia Tarruell is a Professor at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, where she leads the Ultracold Quantum Gases experimental research group. Leticia received her PhD from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2008 under the supervision of Christophe Salomon, on the study of strongly interacting superfluid Fermi gases. As a postdoc in the group of Tilman Esslinger at the ETH Zurich, she studied fermionic atoms in optical lattices as model systems for graphene and quantum magnetism. After a CNRS position at Institut d’Optique in Bordeaux, she joined ICFO in 2013, first as assistant professor and since 2020 as full professor. Her current research focuses on the simulation of unconventional superfluid phases, such as quantum liquid droplets and chiral superfluids, with Bose-Einstein condensates.

Speech Title: Unconventional superfluids in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates with competing interactions

Wolfgang Tittel is an experimental physicist. He received his PhD from the University of Geneva in 2000 for “Quantum correlation for quantum communication”, joined the University of Calgary in 2006 as associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 2013. Since 2018, he is a professor at the EEMCS Department at the TU Delft, and a staff member at QuTech. Dr. Tittel’s research was seminal in bringing quantum communication technology out of the laboratory and into the real world using deployed telecommunication fiber. Notable research results include the first demonstration of measurement-device independent quantum key distribution, which is of particular interest due to its resilience to quantum hacking, its suitability for building networks, and its upgradability to quantum repeater-based communication links; city-wide quantum teleportation; and the storage and recall of members of entangled photon pairs using rare-earth-ion based quantum memory. Dr. Tittel is a founding member of the international quantum cryptography conference QCRYPT, and he has been a member of steering, executive and program committees of various institutes and for various conferences.

Speech Title: How long until a quantum repeater?

Joerg Wrachtrup, Professor and director of the 3rd Institute of Physics and the Center for Applied Quantum Science, University of Stuttgart (2000, continuing) as well as Max Planck fellow at the MPI for Solid State Research Stuttgart, has pioneered the field of single spin physics by initially doing the very first single electron and subsequently the first single nuclear spins experiments. By combining optics and spin resonance he discovered defects in insulators, most notably defects in diamond, as a valuable system for quantum information processing in novel type of quantum sensor for electric and magnetic fields. He and his group pioneered application of these novel sensor techniques. His current research interest is geared towards application of quantum enhanced sensing in bio, medical as well as material sciences.

Professor Wrachtrup published close to 300 papers in refereed journals with numerous Nature and Science papers, plus reviews in both over the past years. In 2011 and 2017, he was awarded two Advanced Research Grant of the European Research Council, in 2012 he received the Leibniz Price of the German Science Foundation, in 2013 the Bruker Prize and in 2014 the Max Planck Research Award. He is member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science and has continuously been listed as “Highly Cited Researcher” since 2014.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Professor Winfried Hensinger heads the Sussex Ion Quantum Technology Group and he is the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies. Hensinger’s group works on developing and constructing practical trapped-ion quantum computers as well quantum sensors. In 2016, Hensinger and his group invented a new approach to quantum computing with trapped ions where voltages applied to a quantum computer microchip can replace billions of laser beams which would have been required in previous proposals on how to build a quantum computer.

In 2017, Hensinger announced the first practical blueprint for building a quantum computer in a paper published in Science Advances (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/2/e1601540.full) giving rise to the assertion that is now possible to construct a large scale quantum computer. Hensinger recently founded, Universal Quantum, a full stack quantum computing company where he serves as Chief Scientist and Chairman.

Hensinger obtained his PhD at the University of Queensland working on quantum non-linear dynamics with cold atoms under supervision of Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Norman Heckenberg and Gerard Milburn. During his PhD research, he spent an extended period at NIST in Gaithersburg, USA in the group of Nobel laureate William Phillips where he accomplished the first demonstration of a highly counterintuitive quantum phenomenon where individual cold atoms move in two opposite directions simultaneously – dynamical tunnelling. He then spent three years at the University of Michigan, in the group of Chris Monroe. At Michigan, Hensinger produced the first ion trap microchip, realized transport through a junction within an ion trap array as a world first and discovered that mild cooling of trap electrodes can mitigate motional heating of trapped ions. He took up a faculty position at the University of Sussex in 2005.

Speech Title: Developing practical quantum computers with trapped ions

Coming soon

Speech Title: Coming soon

Stephan Götzinger is a professor of experimental physics at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research deals with the interaction of light and matter at the nanoscale with an emphasis on single-photon generation and single-photon manipulation with single quantum emitters. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern. In 1999 he started a PhD at the University of Konstanz on the controlled coupling of a single emitter to a high-Q microsphere resonator. During the thesis he moved to the Humboldt-University of Berlin where he completed his thesis in 2004. Then he went as a Feodor-Lynen fellow to Stanford University and joined the quantum-information science group of Y. Yamamoto (2004-2006). From Stanford he moved to ETH Zurich where his research was focussed on single molecule quantum optics (habilitation in 2011). Since 2012 he holds his current position at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Speech Title: A single molecule strongly coupled to a microcavity: nonlinear optics at the single-photon level

Sara Ducci is professor at Université de Paris and member of the Laboratory Matériaux et Phénomènes Quantiques. She received her PhD in Physics at the University of Florence (Italy) in 2000, with a work on pattern formation in nonlinear optical systems. After a postdoctoral position at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel and a position as temporary assistant professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, she joined the University Paris Diderot in 2002. Her research focuses on the development of semiconductor sources of quantum states of light working at room temperature and telecom wavelength: the work ranges from device development to fundamental quantum optics and applications in quantum information. She has been awarded the Louis Ancel Prize of the French Physical Society in 2016 and she is honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

Speech Title: Generation and manipulation of quantum states of light with AlGaAs chips

PhD (2005): At the Weizmann Institute, demonstrated nonlinear interactions with entangled photons.
Postdoc (2005-2008): At Jeff Kimble’s lab in Caltech, led the chip-based cavity-QED effort, and the attainment of Strong Coupling between single atoms and monolithic WGM microresonators..
Since 2009 – heading the Weizmann Quantum Optics group, focusing on single-atom cavity-QED demonstrations of deterministic photon-atom and photon-photon gates.

Speech Title: Photon-atom gates for hybrid quantum information processing

Sophia Economou is an Associate Professor of Physics and the Hassinger Senior Fellow of Physics at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, after which she was a National Research Fellow at the Naval Research Lab, where she eventually held a Research Physicist staff position until 2015. In 2015, she moved to Virginia Tech as Associate Professor. Her present research interests are at the interface of quantum information science, condensed matter physics and quantum optics. She works on quantum computing, communication and simulation, spin qubits, nanophotonics, superconducting qubits, quantum control and decoherence.

Speech Title: Spin-photon interfaces for deterministic graph state generation in repeater networks

Simon Gröblacher is a faculty member of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology, where he has been since November 2014. He completed his masters degree and PhD at the University of Vienna, Austria, working with Markus Aspelmeyer and Anton Zeilinger on quantum communication protocols in higher dimensions, the role of locality and reality in nature and the control of mechanical oscillators using quantum optics tools. Simon then joined Oskar Painter’s group at Caltech as a Marie Curie fellow in 2011, where he focused on optomechanical effects in photonic crystal cavities. His group in Delft has since demonstrated some of the first quantum states of mechanical systems coupled to optics through the radiation pressure force. He has received several prestigious prizes and grants, including the Starting Grant of the European Research Council and a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. His research has been published in journals including Nature, Science, Nature Physics and PRL, amongst others.

Speech Title: Comming soon

Thierry Lahaye (born 1979 in Toulouse, France) studied physics at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He then studied for his PhD at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, under the supervision of Jean Dalibard. In 2006 he joined Tilman Pfau’s group in Stuttgart, Germany, as a post-doctoral researcher, and there he worked on dipolar quantum gases. He was hired by CNRS as a permanent researcher in 2008, and since 2012 he has been in charge, at Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, in Antoine Browaeys’ group, of quantum simulation experiments using arrays of individual Rydberg atoms.

Speech Title: Studying quantum many-body physics using Rydberg atom arrays

Coming soon

Speech Title: Coming soon

Radim Filip (male) is a Professor at the Department of Optics of the Palacky University Olomouc. His research focuses on the development of feasible methods for control, manipulation, and verification of nonclassical quantum states, dominantly quantum non-Gaussian states, and the study of quantum nonlinear processes in quantum optics, quantum optomechanics, atomic physics and superconducting circuits, including applications of these methods in quantum technology. Many of his proposals have already been experimentally verified.

Speech Title: Quantum Non-Gaussian Optics and Mechanics

Prof. Thomas Jennewein is a faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo since 2009. His research is focused on experimental implementations of quantum photonics and quantum optics, foundational questions and experiments of quantum entanglement and quantum science, and in particular, performing quantum communications between ground and space. He is the Principal Investigator for the Canadian QEYSSAT mission proposal. Dr.  Jennewein completed his PhD in 2002 at the University of Vienna, on quantum communication and teleportation experiments with entangled photons, after which he spent one year in automotive industry. From 2004 – 2009 Jennewein was a Senior Scientist at the Vienna Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), with a half-year ARC international fellowship at the University of Queensland. In 2009 he took his position at Waterloo.

Speech Title: Advancing satellite-based quantum communication channels

Since 2009: full professor, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

2003-2009: professor, ICFO, Barcelona, Spain
1996-2003: assistant professor, Innsbruck University, Innsbruck, Austria
1995-1996: senior researcher, Australian National University, Canberra,
Australia
1993: PhD, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany

Expertise: quantum optics, quantum technologies, quantum communication,
trapped ions, single photons, cold atoms, laser cooling, laser
spectroscopy, laser physics

Speech Title: Interfacing and entangling single atoms and single telecom photons