Some time ago I blogged about the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), the centrepiece infrastructure policy of the current Labor government. I’d like to follow up on this issue from a different perspective. In the meantime, both the government and opposition have dedicated themselves to a national broadband policy. So I’d like to analyse the [...]
Democracy is about so much more than just voting for your leaders. There are many other facets like freedom of speech, freedom of belief, the right to a fair trial, the list goes on. One very important facet is freedom of the media. But equally important is an informed citizenry. Importantly, freedom of the media [...]
People often ask me how long it will be before we have an optical quantum computer with post-classical capabilities. My answer, until recently, was that it will be a very, very long time. However, a recent landmark theoretical study by Aaronson & Arkhipov (here) suggests that the timeline could be much shorter than previously expected. [...]
Full article here. by Peter P. Rohde, Gavin K. Brennen, Alexei Gilchrist Quantum walks have emerged as an interesting approach to quantum information processing, exhibiting many unique properties compared to the analogous classical random walk. Here we introduce a model for a discrete-time quantum walk with memory by endowing the walker with multiple recycled coins [...]
I’ve known about Kickstarter for quite some time, but never really delved into it. Kickstarter is a ‘crowdfunding’ service, whereby people can contribute cash to upstart projects with a promise of some arbitrary form of reward if the project succeeds. In my mind, crowdfunding takes venture capital (VC) to the next level. VC is very [...]
Full article here. by Peter P. Rohde, Joseph F. Fitzsimons, Alexei Gilchrist. Quantum states of light are the obvious choice for communicating quantum information. To date, encoding information into the polarisation states of single photons has been widely used as these states form an natural closed two state qubit. However, photons are able to encode [...]
When I was a budding young PhD student, trying to find my way into the world of academia and theoretical physics, there was a small group of people who guided me, stood up for me, collaborated with me, provided a guiding hand, and acted as wonderful, compassionate friends. One of those people was Sean Barrett, [...]
The Mineral Resource Rent Tax (MRRT), aka the Mining Tax, is a big issue in Australia lately. For the non-Australian readers, this is a tax on non-renewable resources that are exploited by the mining industry on Australian territory. Most people from my side of politics vehemently oppose the Mining Tax, criticising it as “yet another [...]
Download full text here. Linear optics quantum computing (LOQC) is a leading candidate for the implementation of large scale quantum computers. Here quantum information is encoded into the quantum states of light and computation proceeds via a linear optics network. It is well known that in such schemes there are stringent requirements on the spatio-temporal [...]
This post is on quantum mechanics, but is intended to be understandable by anyone. The small amount of mathematical notation that I introduce should be fairly digestible to anyone without a physics background. A couple of nights ago I had a dinner table conversation with a fellow physicist, who raised the highly emotive, almost religious [...]