100 Years of Quantum: The Journey from Great Science to Societal Impact

Optica Distinguished Lecture Series on Quantum Science and Technology

The United Nations proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, recognizing 100 years of development of quantum mechanics. Join us in celebrating how quantum changes our world.

About the Speaker

Peter Knight is Chair of the UK National Quantum Technology Programme Strategy Advisory Board and has been involved in the creation of the UK Quantum programme since its inception, including the creation of the UK Quantum Strategy and the commitment of GBP 2.5bn over the next decade to the field. He is a Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College. Peter was knighted in 2005 for his work in optical physics. Knight was the 2004 President of Optica and the 2011 - 2013 President of the Institute of Physics. He was, until 2010, chair of the UK Defense Scientific Advisory Council and remains a UK Government science advisor.

Building Entanglement Distribution Networks

Optica Distinguished Lecture Series on Quantum Science and Technology

Entanglement correlations allow distributed quantum systems to be described in the same physical state, and is a resource for many of the technologies that we call Quantum 2.0. What is a practical distance over which we can distribute entanglement? In this session, I will review and discuss the physical layer of the entanglement distribution network, including both ground and space segments. I will share some of the lessons we have learned in deploying quantum systems outside the lab and hope to share some of the latest findings from our experiments.

About the Speaker

Professor Alexander Ling, a Principal Investigator from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has been named Distinguished International Associate (DIA) by the United Kingdom’s (UK) Royal Academy of Engineering for his strong track record of work in quantum communication and quantum networking. He is among 10 researchers and the sole awardee in Singapore selected for the 2024 DIA program, which provides a grant to support his collaborations with UK scientists on quantum space technologies for one year.

His team has been involved in four launch campaigns that place quantum experiments in space. One of these campaigns led to the 2019 deployment of the SpooQy-1 satellite demonstrating entangled photon generation on a nanosatellite. In 2024, his team also participated in the Space Entanglement and Annealing QUantum Experiment (SEAQUE) mission that will test self-healing quantum detectors on the International Space Station.

Talk Title TBD

Optica Distinguished Lecture Series on Quantum Science and Technology

About the Speaker

Dr. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero is the Founder and Chief Executive of Nu Quantum. She is an award-winning quantum physicist and inventor who has authored several high-impact research papers and a book based on her doctoral research. Before founding Nu Quantum, Carmen earned her PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge and an undergraduate degree at Imperial College London. In addition to her work at Nu Quantum, she serves on the Technical Advisory Board of the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre and is a co-founder and director of UKQuantum, the UK’s quantum industry group. Carmen has been the leader of several pro-equality and LGBTQIA+ visibility groups and initiatives in STEM. She has been featured in media outlets such as Wired, Forbes, BBC and Sifted.

Quantum Computing – Hype, Hope, and Fun

Quantum computers exploit the bizarre features of quantum physics - uncertainty, entanglement, and measurement - to perform impossible tasks using conventional means. These may include the computing and optimizing over ungodly amounts of data, breaking encryption standards and simulating models of chemistry and materials. Tempering the hype are the facts that (a) few use cases can be proven and (b) quantum computers are notoriously hard to build and scale. Nevertheless, many important problems, known and unknown, will likely never be solved until we have quantum computers. I will discuss the state-of-the-art in quantum computing, led by an uneasy coalition of scientists and engineers from academia, industry and government.

About the Speaker

Christopher Monroe is Professor of ECE and Physics at Duke University and the co-Founder and Chief Scientist of IonQ, Inc. Monroe is an atomic physicist and quantum engineer, specializing in the isolation of individual atoms for applications in quantum information science.  At NIST in the 1990s, Monroe co-led the team that demonstrated the first quantum logic gate. At the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland, Monroe’s research group pioneered all aspects of trapped atomic ion based quantum computers, making the first steps toward a scalable, reconfigurable and modular quantum computer system. In 2016, he co-founded IonQ, a startup company leading the way in the fabrication of full-stack quantum computers. Monroe is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is one of the key architects of the U.S. National Quantum Initiative passed by the United States Congress in 2018.

Chip-scale Quantum Many-body Systems with Semiconductor Color Centers in Integrated Photonics

Optically interfaced spin qubits based on diamond and silicon carbide color centers are considered promising candidates for scalable quantum networks and sensors. However, they can also be used to build chip-scale quantum many-body systems with tunable all-to-all interactions between qubits enabled by photonics - useful for quantum simulation and possibly computing.

About the Speaker

Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor of Global Leadership, Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Applied Physics at Stanford. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. Her awards include the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Geoffrey Frew Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences, the IET A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize, the Mildred Dresselhaus Lectureship from MIT, and the Humboldt Prize. She is a Fellow of the APS, Optica, and IEEE. Vuckovic is a co-founder and a lead scientific advisor of SPINS Photonics, and a lead editor of Physical Review Applied.