Talks

We normally think of large accelerators and large-scale cosmic events when we consider the frontiers of elementary particle physics, pushing to understand the universe at higher and higher energy scales. However, several tabletop low-energy experiments are posed to discover a wide range of new physics beyond the Standard model, where feeble interactions require precision measurements rather than high energies.  In our experiments, high-Q resonant sensors enable ultra-sensitive force and field detection. In this talk I will describe two applications of these sensors in searches for new physics, based on techniques in atomic-molecular-and optical (AMO) physics. First, I will discuss an experiment which uses laser-cooled optically trapped silica nanospheres to search for corrections to Newtonian gravity at micron distances with zeptonewton sensitivity.  Finally, I will discuss the Axion Resonant InterAction Detection Experiment (ARIADNE), a new precision magnetometry experiment using laser-polarized 3-He gas to search for a notable dark-matter candidate: the QCD axion.  

We prove that constant-depth quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. We describe an explicit (i.e., non-oracular) computational problem which can be solved with certainty by a constant-depth quantum circuit composed of one- and two-qubit gates. In contrast, we prove that any classical probabilistic circuit composed of bounded fan-in gates that solves the problem with high probability must have depth logarithmic in the input size. This is joint work with Sergey Bravyi and Robert Koenig (arXiv:1704.00690).