IQIS welcome party - IQIS Faculty

You are invited to the IQIS welcome party on Wednesday, September 28, at 3:00pm-5:00pm in SB 144. Light snack, pop, tea, and coffee will be served.  Come and celebrate our new members, graduated and graduating members and welcome everyone back from holidays.  Three of our newer Faculty members Paul Barclay, Dennis Salahub and Renate Scheidler will each give a presentation on their work and its relation to IQIS.  This is an opportunity to learn about their work, to mingle, and to start on a new exciting year!  The schedule for the event is

3:00-3:05 Welcome
3:05-3:25 Paul Barclay presentation
"Nanoscale photonics for probing artificial atoms and other quantum systems"
A longstanding goal among quantum physicists is the development of optical circuits connecting quantum systems, allowing small numbers of photons to create entanglement between quantum "nodes." In this talk I will present my contributions to this effort, and discuss how the nanoscale photonic components that I study can also be excellent sensors and ultralow power information processing elements.
3:25-3:45 Dennis Salahub presentation
"Wanderings and wonderings of a quantum chemist in the coherent/decoherent world of biology"
I will try to hit the highlights of a multiscale approach to electron transfer in biology. This started out about 4 or 5 years ago with discussions amongst Stu Kauffman, Barry Sanders, Nathan Babcock, Aurélien de la Lande, Honza Řezáč and myself. Nathan, Aurelien and Honza settled on the problem of understanding the electron transfer between two proteins and they did some very nice work using Molecular Dynamics and an empirical pathway model that brought out the crucial role of water molecules in the interfacial region between the donor protein and the acceptor (published in PNAS). We are now digging deeper into the nature of the non-adiabatic terms that determine the transfer rate, within the framework of the two-state Marcus theory and decoherence theory.
3:45-4:15 Light food/snack served; some IQIS related material presented
4:15-4:35 Renate Scheidler presentation
Classical Cryptographic Key Agreement Via Low Genus Curves
The celebrated 1976 Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol allows two parties to securely establish a common secret cryptographic key across an insecure communication channel. Since then, a variety of structures have been proposed to serve as the underlying key space for this protocol. Among these, elliptic and genus 2 hyperelliptic curves are the most efficient and classically the most secure ... until quantum computers become a reality, in which case all discrete logarithm based public key cryptosystems will be completely broken. I will give a whirlwind tour of the arithmetic on such curves, explain how and why the genus 2 setting represents an attractive alternative to the much more widely used elliptic curves, and touch upon my own research interests in this area.
Looking forward to seeing you all!