Session E01: Plenary Session 2

Superconductivity: There's Plenty of Cream at the Bottom

In 1961, Brian Pippard gave a speech at IBM called "The Cat and the Cream", in which he declared that the superconductivity field was finished, at least for "young innocents who wish to break new ground": the cream was gone, and the bowl was empty. I show why the subsequent 6 decades proved him so dramatically wrong, how new materials and experimental techniques have continuously driven new theoretical understandings, such that the field has been constantly renewed, and is in fact a very good place for young researchers to make a career.   

Quantum computing over the rainbow

In this talk, I will present how the quantum version of the optical frequency comb can be used as a universal quantum computing platform. This quantum optical frequency comb is not emitted by a laser (as is usually the case for the classical OFC) but by an optical parametric oscillator whose two-photon emission provides the basic entanglement mechanism for quantum computing. Also, in this implementation, qubits are replaced with quantum optical fields, a.k.a. qumodes. I will review progress by research groups around the world, which includes current record qumode scalability over all qubit platforms.   

Biophysics: Life at the frontier

The behavior of living systems is governed by physical principles. The study of biological processes on all scales, including the folding of proteins, the mechanics of cell division, and even the migration and expansion of animal species benefits from applying our understanding of physical laws, and statistical physics, in particular. We will discuss how statistical physics helps explain the properties of competition and evolution at the edges of growing cellular populations, such as a developing tissue, a cancerous invasion, or an expanding microbial colony. Such populations may have a complex shape, such as the branched growth of kidney ducts or microbial colonies grown under nutrient-limited conditions. We will show how the population shape impacts the ability of a cell strain to survive within the population and calculate survival probabilities by applying the tools of statistical physics. In doing so, we draw surprising connections between the biology and more ``common'' physical phenomena such as the freezing of water and the separation of oil and vinegar.