Quantum in the Crowd

by Giacomo Ferranti On the week between Monday 28 th of August and Friday 2 nd of September, I attended a summer school organized by Epixfab at Gent University in Belgium. The event was mainly focused on classical integrated photonics. Most of the talks on the first two days were meant to introduce the most common integrated components and to present the state of the art of their specifications. I personally found particularly useful the talk given by Dr. Laurent Vivien (Paris-Sud University, France) on integrated germanium photo-detectors. Many of the speakers talking on the following days were from companies like HP, IMEC, Luxtera or ST Microelectronics, but there were also interesting talks from academics like  Prof. Jose Capmany, from Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain. Prof. Mark Thompson who is one of the senior academics at the Centre for Quantum Photonics was a speaker too. He gave a very good talk on quantum applications of integrated photonics,...

by Dr Döndü Sahin   Last year in September 2015 the Centre for Quantum Photonics ( CQP ), received an email from the European Commission (EC) inviting them to nominate a  Marie Sklodowska-Curie  fellow for a limited number of places to participate at the 66th Lindau Physics Nobel Laureate meeting. I was nominated by  Jeremy O’Brien   and  Mark Thompson as an experienced researcher under the Marie-Curie ITN in Photonic Integrated Compound Quantum Encoding ( PICQUE ) project directed by  Fabio Sciarrino  (Uni Roma). The selection process was two-fold, after my nomination by CQP 1  I submitted my supporting application to the EC and by the end of October first evaluations were positive. The EC forwarded my application to the Lindau Nobel meeting selection committee and on the 1st of March 2016, I was emailed by the Lindau committee to confirm that my application was successful. I was one of 400 applicants from over...