Event Details

Paola Cappellaro, Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, Quantum Engineering Group, will speak about "Practical Quantum Advantage in Sensing." 

"Quantum sensors exploit the strong sensitivity of quantum systems to external disturbances to measure various signals in their environment with high precision. Nitrogen Vacancy color centers in diamond have in particular emerged as exquisite probes of magnetic fields. These quantum sensors have the potential to be a revolutionary tool in material science, quantum information processing, and bioimaging. For example, they could be used to image single molecules, thus performing MRI at the nanoscale. However, the same strong coupling to the environment also limits their sensitivity due to its decohering effects. Error correction strategies, including  dynamical decoupling, can help in fighting decoherence, but they incur the risk of also canceling the coupling to the signal to be measured.

"Here I will show recent advances in tackling this challenge, including exploiting and improving control and the use of ancillary systems, that achieve an advantageous compromise between noise and signal cancellation. These strategies can not only improve the sensitivity of quantum sensors, but also yield new applications, via the transduction of biological signals of interest into quantum perturbations or the frequency up/down-conversion of signals of interest."

Refreshments at 3 PM.