Great news at QTeQ: the paper
T. B. Batalhao et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140601 (2014)
recently published in Phys Rev Lett by Gabriele and Mauro, with the key contributions from QTeQ former member Laura Mazzola and the group’s Brazilian and Irish collaborators, has been picked as an “Editors’ suggestion”. Only one in six papers published in Phys Rev Lett is selected as Editors’ Suggestions.
The Letter, which reports the first experimental investigation of finite-time thermodynamics in a quantum system, is the fourth one in a row from QTeQ being selected as Editors’ Suggestion, the fourth Letter from the group this year, and embodies a landmark in quantum control in NMR. The work on thermodynamics pursued by QTeQ keeps on attracting international attention and recognition, and is supported by generous grants from the EU project TherMiQ, and the John Templeton Foundation.
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.”
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.
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!
The Third Working Group meeting of the COST Action MP1209 “Thermodynamics at the quantum scale” will be hosted by QTeQ on 18-20 August 2014. The meeting will be held at the Wellington Park Hotel and will host some of the best young and affirmed scientists working in the broad area of quantum thermodynamics (from fundamental features to implementations). The list of invited speakers include Antonio Acin, Lidia del Rio, Mikko Mottonen, Ahsan Nazir, and Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler, besides our own Gabriele De Chiara.
The group has worked hard to make sure that everything is set in the best possible way. Hopefully, we will have three inspiring days of great science and interaction!
New results from the collaboration between QTeQ members and the University of Calabria and Palermo, on non-Markovian open system dynamics of quantum systems have been published in Phys. Rev. A recently.
Tony (joint postdoc in Cosenza and Belfast), Carlo (now at ICL and honorary perpetual member of QTeQ), and Mauro have worked with Salvatore Lorenzo (Palermo) and Francesco Plastina (Calabria) on aspects of the hierarchy among different measures of non-Markovianity for a system exposed to competing environmental effects. The results of the work have appeared in
Tony J. G. Apollaro, Salvatore Lorenzo, Carlo Di Franco, Francesco Plastina, and Mauro Paternostro, Competition between memory-keeping and memory-erasing decoherence channels, Phys. Rev. A 90, 012310 (2014)
In the enduring effort performed at QTeQ to explore the link between the physics of quantum many-body systems and the features of quantum entanglement, Gabriele and the group’s honorary member Giacomo Torlai (LMU Munich), have recently published a new article in J. Stat. Mech., which is the reference journal of the community interested in statistical mechanics (including the quantum scenario). Details of the work, which is a result of Gabriele’s collaboration with Luca Tagliacozzo (ICFO Barcelona), can be found in
G Torlai, L Tagliacozzo, and G. De Chiara, Dynamics of the entanglement spectrum in spin chains, J. Stat. Mech. P06001 (2014)
which is a contribution to the journal’s special issue on “Quantum Entanglement in Condensed Matter Physics”. Congratulations to both Giacomo and Gabriele!!
A new paper has been published in Phys. Rev. Lett. as a collaboration between the University of Trieste, University of Southampton, and QTeQ.
A non-interferometric method, entirely based on the modifications experienced by the massive oscillating mirror of an optomechanical cavity, has been proposed by Mohammad Bahrami, Angelo Bassi, Hendrik Ulbricht, and Mauro to study possible corrections to Schroedinger equations embodied by the so-called Continuous Spontaneous Localization model.
Details of the work can be found in
M. Bahrami, M. Paternostro, A. Bassi, and H. Ulbricht, Proposal for a Noninterferometric Test of Collapse Models in Optomechanical Systems,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 210404 (2014)
The paper has been picked as an Editors’ Suggestion in Phys. Rev. Lett., which is the third time for QTeQ.
Congratulations to Ruari on his first published paper! His work on open-system dynamics and Non-Markovianity in collision-based models has been recently published in Phys. Rev. A and is already raising quite a bit of attention! Check out the details i
R. McCloskey and M. Paternostro, Phys. Rev. A 88, 052120 (2014)
Congratulazioni, Ruari!!
Double success in April for QTeQ: Alessandro, Andre’, and Mauro managed to publish two separate research papers in the prestigious pages of Phys Rev Lett. In
Phys Rev Lett 112, 133604 (2014)
Andre’ and Mauro, together with research collaborators from Aarhus, Innsbruck, and Strasbourg, study phonon dynamics in a multi-element optomechanical system, paving the way to the exploration of many-body physics and coherent excitation transport in artificial optomechanical nanostructures. In
Phys Rev Lett 112, 133605 (2014)
Alessandro proposes a way to gain access to the field contained within a high-quality resonator without affecting the state of the radiation initially contained in it, keeping an eye on the experimental feasibility of the proposal. The work is the result of the ongoing collaboration between Alessandro and researchers at Imperial College London and University College London.