KTP award to Jim

Physics means business

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between researchers in the QteQ group
(School of Mathematics and Physics) and Hughes Insurance has been named as the
NI Regional Winner in this year’s KTP Awards, held last night (Thurs, 25 Sept) in The Merchant Hotel.

Speaking about the award, Hughes’ Chief Executive, Gareth Brady, said: “Hughes Insurance has been working closely with Jim McCann at Queen’s for the last three years to develop new ways to improve our customer contact activities. The KTP was hugely successful for us, embedding new technology and expertise in our business, and contributing to a 4.5 per cent increase in customer retention figures.”

“We found that ideas from entropy in complex systems theory can be used to search for patterns in customer data” said Dr McCann.
“This simplifies the data in a scientific way and provides customers with the product they need”.

Recognising the success of Queen’s in this year’s awards, Dr Mary Flynn, Head of KTP and Business Networks at Queen’s, added:
“I am delighted to see so many of our Partnerships being recognised for their hard work and commitment. Queen’s is where business begins and it is now, more than ever, that businesses need to think of new ways to stay ahead of the competition. Our KTPs at Queen’s enable them to do that by giving unrivalled access to the world-class research and technology available here.”

PIEAS-QTeQ paper published in PRA

QTeQ former long-term visitor Fazal Badshah has published a paper on the dynamics of a coupled-cavity array containing multiple two-level atoms. The work, written in collaboration with Prof. Shahid Qamar (PIEAS, Islamabad) and Mauro describes the generation of multisite entangled states and the transfer of excitations resulting from the competition of tunnelling and onsite nonlinearities. Deatils of the work can be found at

Fazal Badshah, Shahid Qamar, and Mauro Paternostro, Phys. Rev. A 90, 033813 (2014)

The paper is the result of the great work that Fazal did in Belfast in 2013, supported by a HEC studentship from Pakistan and the generosity of Shahid. At QTeQ we all wish to see Fazal soon and to keep up the collaboration with him and Shahid.

Mariona joins QTeQ

We are very happy because Mariona Moreno-Cardoner has joined the group this September. Mariona is an expert of ultracold atoms and strongly correlated quantum systems. She got her PhD from University of Barcelona (UB), was a PostDoc at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and was long term visitor at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. At QTeQ, she will mainly work on Gabriele’s EPSRC grant on optical lattices. Welcome!