Professor Fred Strauch – Gettysburg College and NIST
Title: “Perfect Quantum State Transfer with Superconducting Phase Qubits”
In 1980, Tony Leggett argued that the validity of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic legel can and should be to experimental test. Verification would finally force us to accept the radical viewpoint that the superposition principle holds on all scales of size and complexity; a breakdown of quantum theory would be even more radical. I will explore this argument, describe recent experimental developments, and present a theoretical proposal to use superconducting phase qubits (quantum bits) to implement perfect quantum state transfer between nodes of a hypercube network. This example of novel quantum transport has applications for both quantum computing and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level.