51³Ô¹ÏÍø

An Annual Student Congress on Quantum Information and Computation.

The AQuA Student Congress on Quantum Information and Computation is an annual student conference organised by the students from four major quantum information research institutions: CQT, Singapore; IQC, Waterloo; 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College, London and MIT, Massachusetts. This year, the third installment of the congress was held here at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College between 30th August - 1st September 2013, right after the QuICC summer school ended. The local organisers were Fern Watson and Tanapat Deesuwan from cohort 2 and Devin Dunseith and Andre Ranchin from cohort 3.

The aim of the congress is to give a chance for the participants to present their current research, to learn what other people are working on, and to encourage friendships and bonds between the young researchers in this field which will be useful for them in the future. The event attracted students from nearly every part of the world. There were 47 participants, most of whom were PhD students together with several enthusiastic Masters students. The topics were quite broad, ranging from foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum computation to photonics experiments and open quantum systems. We also had several social events: the BBQ night and the boat trip to Greenwich which was great fun!

The following are part of the feedback from the participants:

 "...it was the poster session that turned out to be the highlight of my trip. It was during this session that I had the opportunity to introduce my poster to none other than Prof. M. S. Kim. It was a wonderful learning experience for me..."   

Anindya Banerji, West Bengal University of Technology

"...It was a particularly rewarding experience for me as a physicist in a position of still choosing my topic for a PhD - talking to people at the frontier of Quantum Information & Computing let me broaden my horizons and stimulate my own academic aspirations..." 

Liutauras Rusaitis, University of Oxford