QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

Electronic energy transfer (EET) is a ubiquitous photophysical process that plays a crucial role in the light-harvesting capabilities of natural antenna complexes, and could also hold important implications in artificial systems. Emerging experimental breakthroughs indicate that the dynamics of light harvesting is not fully described by a classical random-walk picture, but also quantum coherent transfer takes place.

During the last decade, quantum entanglement has been intensively studied within quantum information science and has also appeared as a natural goal of recent quantum experiments. Because of that the theoretical background of detecting entanglement has been rapidly developing. However, most of this development concentrated on bipartite or few-party entanglement, while today's experiments typically involve many particles.

MULTI replaces the familiar sequential model of computation that uses Boolean variables and combinational gates by logic operations that are executed in parallel on devices that have a built-in many state memory and whose inputs and outputs are multivalued. MULTI seeks to design, simulate and experimentally implement proof of principle devices on the atomic and molecular scale.

Information is physical. During the last decade, this basic concept has led to a revolution in our understanding of quantum mechanics. Less attention has been paid so far to equally important implications of this principle in statistical mechanics of small systems, where statistical fluctuations are large and make their thermodynamic properties extremely dependent on the information available. The most basic process illustrating the importance of information to statistical systems is the information-to-energy conversion in the famous Maxwell’s Demon (MD).

The QUANTIHEAT project tackles issues related to thermal metrology at the nanoscale and aims at delivering validated standards, methods and modeling tools for nanothermal designs and measurements.

The past couple of years have witnessed the rise of on-chip quantum optics. This has been enabled by the fabrication of high-finesse superconducting resonators made out of coplanar waveguides, and by the coupling of these resonators to superconducting quantum bits, qubits. This so-called circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) has proven superior compared with the standard cavity QED with photons coupled to atoms in three-dimensional space.

NEMSQED is a research effort where superconducting and nanomechanical systems ares studied near the quantum limit.  The aim is to forge a hybrid macroscopic quantum system of superconducting qubits, electrical resonators and nanomechanical resonators, with highly beneficial potential applications in quantum information processing and quantum communication.

The project is an individual European Research Council (ERC) grant allocated to Dr. Mika Sillanpää, currently working as a Professor at the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University.

The “Quantum Nano-Electronics Training” project, with acronym Q-NET, is a European network of experts providing state-of-the-art training for young researchers in the general field of experimental, applied and theoretical Quantum Nano-Electronics.