Renowned atomic, molecular, and optical physicist Dr. Paul Kwiat is on campus this week to talk to students, faculty, and others about quantum physics.  

Kwiat is this year’s speaker for the George W. and Mildred K. White Science Lecture Series, and will present a free public lecture, “The Quantum Information Revolution: How entanglement will — and won’t — enhance computing, communication, and sensing,” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 17, in Riley Auditorium at the Battelle Fine Arts Center, 170 W. Park St.

A recording of the public lecture will be available at www.otterbein.edu/slslivestream.

For those who study physics, there will also be a technical lecture at 10:20 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 18, at The Point at Otterbein, 60 Collegeview Road. 

About the Public Lecture:  

By now many people have probably heard about recent developments in quantum computing, teleportation, and the like. But what’s really going on, what’s hype, what’s promise, and what’s unknown? In this lecture Kwiat explains in simple terms some of the quantum “magic” we have at our disposal, why it helps, and when it probably won’t. He’ll discuss the quintessential phenomenon of quantum entanglement and, time permitting, give a brief lesson in quantum cooking. 

About the Speaker:  

Kwiat is the Bardeen Chair in Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the inaugural Director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST). A Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, he has given invited talks at numerous national and international conferences and has authored over 160 articles on various topics in quantum optics and quantum information, including several review articles. His research focuses on optical implementations of quantum information protocols, particularly using entangled—and hyperentangled—photons from parametric down-conversion. He received the Optical Society of America 2009 R. W. Wood Prize, as the primary inventor of the world’s first sources of polarization-entangled photons from down-conversion, which have been used for quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, quantum metrology, and realizing optical quantum gates. Currently he leads the NASA JPL-funded Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment (SEAQUE), which is the first US-led quantum information space project. 

About the Series:  

Established in 1987, the George W. and Mildred K. White Science Lecture Series at Otterbein University sponsors annual scientific seminars that bring national leaders in science and technology to campus to share their insights about the future of scientific endeavor. Past speakers have included Dr. Robert Grubbs, 2005 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry; Dr. Tina Henkin, 2006 winner of the National Academies of Science Pfizer Prize; Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and renowned experimental psychologist; Dr. Andrea Ghez, an international expert in observational astrophysics; Dr. Sean B. Carroll, a leading voice of evolutionary science in the U.S.; animal behaviorist Dr. Steve Nowicki; and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. William D. Phillips. For more information, visit www.otterbein.edu/sciencelectureseries.