9 physicists discuss what lies ahead in physics, from the Quantum to the Cosmos. Drs. White and Zeilinger appear courtesy of Institute for Quantum Computing.

Quantum computers hold the promise to revolutionize the way we secure information, compute and understand the quantum world. Although general-purpose quantum computers appear to be a long way off, we do have good test-beds of small quantum processors. One of the most versatile quantum test-beds is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR): a version of which is familiar to many in the guise of the medical imaging modality, MRI. In fact NMR has broad importance to society: it is used in drug discovery, in oil exploration and to monitor the processing of cheese and chocolate.

This panel will explore some of the deepest questions facing those who would harness the power of quantum mechanics in new quantum technologies: What are the newest and most interesting discoveries researchers have made about quantum information? What progress has been made in recent years towards experimentally harnessing quantum devices for quantum computation? What are the main motivations for building quantum information processing technologies? Drs. Aharonov and Shor appear courtesy of Institute for Quantum Computing.

Computer science has served to isolate programs and programmers from knowledge of the mechanisms used to manipulate information, however this fiction is increasingly hard to maintain as devices scale down in size and systems scale up in complexity. This talk will explore the consequences of exposing rather than hiding this underlying physical reality, in areas including logic automata, interdevice internetworking, intelligent infrastructure, digital fabrication and programmable matter.

I will discuss recent advances in our understanding of extrinsic defects in topologically ordered states. These include line defects, where I will discuss recent developments in the classification of gapped boundaries between Abelian topological states, and various kinds of point defects, which host a rich set of topological physics.

In this talk I will show how to obtain a detailed characterization of the emergent topological order starting from microscopic Hamiltonian on a two dimensional lattice. A key step is to obtain a tensor network representation for a complete set of ground states of the Hamiltonian, first on an infinite cylinder and then on a finite torus. As an application of the method I will study lattice Hamiltonians that give rise to selected anyon models, namely chiral semion, Ising as well as Z_3 and Z_5 models.

The E8 state of bosons is a 2+1d gapped phase of matter which has no topological entanglement entropy but has protected chiral edge states in the absence of any symmetry.  This peculiar state is interesting in part because it sits at the boundary between short- and long-range entangled phases of matter.  When the system is translation invariant and for special choices of parameters, the edge states form the chiral half of a 1+1d conformal field theory - an E8 level 1 Wess-Zumino-Witten model.  However, in general the velocities of different edge channels are different and the system d

Achievable experimental systems in quantum and atomic optics, the effects of measurement and control on quantum systems, quantum technologies for processing information and quantum computation.