Reflections on Condensed Matter Physics in the City 2023 - Quantum Materials: Information and Technology
Our call, together with our partners in the Hubbard Theory Consortium, to unite the quantum materials community around the topics of quantum technology, quantum information, and related aspects has drawn an enthusiastic group of researchers from across the globe to join this year’s edition of “Condensed Matter Physics in the City”. With 162 registered participants from 32 nationalities, we were proud to host the talks of 14 invited and 10 contributed speakers. Most attendees joined in person this year, with a full lecture theatre throughout, and a few more participants online. This was a welcome change from previous years, and helped tremendously in revitalising the free-discussion format that CMPCity has always been known for. A case in point was Frank Schindler who announced at the start of his talk that he had prepared only 10 viewgraphs, and would be happy to discuss any questions – he barely made it beyond slide three before his time was almost over, as the discussion filled the time with no effort at all!
Our annual outreach lecture was another noteworthy event. This year it was delivered (to a fully booked venue at Imperial College) by IBM Quantum’s Chief Technology Officer, Oliver Dial. During his one-hour talk, he took us from the early days of quantum computing through the roadmap for the next years, which should see the first useful applications of novel quantum computers. Again, the audience was extremely engaged, and the questions kept rolling for about as long as Oliver had spoken. The next day, we also heard about some envelope-pushing experiments to study the physics of magnetism on the IBM machines, while Ashvin Vishwanath had reported a few days earlier on the realisation of an exciting quantum state carrying non-Abelian quasiparticles on Google’s latest quantum chip. Clearly, quantum computing is already venturing in very exciting territory, and the next breakthroughs should give us a range of new insights into quantum matter in the very near term. Indeed, talks throughout the week connected these dots to exciting questions about quantum matter more broadly, venturing into the latest mysteries of strongly correlated matter such as UTe2 and other unconventional superconductors or the quest into the complex phase diagrams of moiré superlattices and van der Waals materials.
As an event sponsored by the institute of complex adaptive matter (ICAM), we are particularly eager to promote junior researchers and allow for a good gender balance among our speakers. We are happy to report about 30% of the audience and, importantly, 4 of our invited speakers being female. We hope that our next generation of female graduate students will be inspired by these role models. We have also been able to extend financial support to 24 junior participants thanks to our sponsors.