Raymond Laflamme

Raymond Laflamme is a Canadian physicist and the co-founder and current director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He is also a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Laflamme is currently a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information.^[1]

As Stephen Hawking's PhD student, he first became famous for convincing Stephen Hawking that time does not reverse in a contracting universe, along with Don Page. Stephen Hawking told the story of how this happened in his famous book A Brief History of Time in the chapter The Arrow of Time.^[2] Later on Laflamme made a name for himself in quantum computing and quantum information theory, which is what he is famous for today. In 2005, Laflamme's research group created the world's largest quantum information processor with 12 qubits.^[3] Along with Phillip Kaye and Michele Mosca, he published An Introduction to Quantum Computing in 2006.^[4]

Laflamme's research focuses on understanding the impact of manipulating information using the laws of quantum mechanics, the development of methods to protect quantum information against noise through quantum control and quantum error correction for quantum computing and cryptography, the implementation of ideas and concepts of quantum information processing using nuclear magnetic resonance to develop scalable methods of control of quantum systems, and the development of blueprints for quantum information processors such as linear optical quantum computing.^[5]

Biography

Laflamme was born in Quebec City in 1960 to a medical doctor father and a dietician mother. He finished his undergraduate education at the Universite Laval in Canada and went on to doctoral studies at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.^[5] His PhD supervisor was Stephen Hawking. Hawking has mentioned in his book A Brief History of Time that Laflamme and Don Page were responsible for convincing him that time does not reverse in a contracting universe.^[2]

After completing his PhD, Laflamme worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia as well as Cambridge before joining the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His work during this time was ranked amongst the Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year from the journal Science in 1998. In 2001, he joined the newly founded Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Physics and Astronomy department of the affiliated University of Waterloo, where he and Michele Mosca founded the Institute for Quantum Computing.^[5] In 2003, he became director of the Quantum Information program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; he is also the scientific director of QuantumWorks, Canada's national research consortium on Quantum Information Science, and holds the Canadian Research Chair in Quantum Information.^[6]

Scientific Work

Though he started his career working in quantum gravity and cosmology, Raymond Laflamme is known as a pioneering scientist in quantum information theory. While at Los Alamos, he was involved with the experimental implementation of quantum information processing devices using nuclear magnetic resonance. He is also credited with developing a theoretical scheme for efficient quantum computation using linear optics, along with Emmanuel Knill and Gerard Milburn.^[7] Laflamme laid down the mathematical framework for quantum error-correcting codes, which has since developed into a broad topic of research. With colleagues Cesar Miquel, Juan Paz and Wojciech Zurek, he constructed the most compact quantum error correcting code.^[8]

Honours

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008 ^[9]
• Canadian Premier's Discovery Award in the field of Natural Sciences and Engineering in 2008 ^[10]
• Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2011 ^[11]
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 ^[12]
• Honorary Degree from Université de Sherbrooke in 2012 ^[13]

Media

Laflamme was a featured scientist in the award-winning ^[14] documentary, "The Quantum Tamers" ^[15] which was presented by the Perimeter Institute and saw its Canadian premiere in October 2009 at the Quantum to Cosmos festival in Waterloo, Ontario. Laflamme was also a participant in The Agenda With Steve Paikin discussion panel, "Wired 24/7", with Neil Gershenfeld, Jaron Lanier, Neal Stephenson, and Tara Hunt at the Quantum to Cosmos festival. The following year, Laflamme was a contributor at the 2010 TEDx event in Waterloo, Ontario.^[16]

Laflamme was involved in several events surrounding the grand-opening of the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo. He was a participant at the "Bridging Worlds" panel discussion with Ivan Semeniuk, Mike Lazaridis, Tom Brzustowski, and Chad Orzel at the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre Open House in 2012.^[17] As part of the grand-opening events, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony performed "Quantum: Music at the Frontier of Science" of which Laflamme was a collaborator in the creation of the concert narrative.^[18]

Laflamme will be appearing as a speaker at BrainSTEM: Your Future is Now Festival which is running from September 30 to October 6, 2013.^[19]

References

External links

• IQC profile: Raymond Laflamme
• The Agenda With Steve Paikin: Wired 24/7?
• TEDxWaterloo: Raymond Laflamme
• Oxford University Press Catalog: An Introduction to Quantum Computing