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Category: Quantum Information

Patents play an important role in the commercial exploitation of emerging technologies. It it therefore not surprising that more and more patents related to quantum information (QI) technologies are granted. D-Wave Systems, the Canada-based company behind the controversial D-Wave Two quantum computer prototype, holds over 260 patents. MagiQ, one of the first companies to supply equipment for quantum cryptographic communication, owns more than 160 patents in that area. Apart from D-Wave Systems and MagiQ, there are many other contestants that heavily invest in QI technologies and who demarcate their innovations by means of patents. In this article I'll try to provide a concise overview of the patent activity in QI technologies. For readers unfamiliar with either patents or QI technologies, I've compiled two primers.

Category: Command Line Magic

In this article I'll describe some Linux command-line tools to analyze and convert text files between different character encodings. I'll also touch on the different newline encodings of the major operating systems. Finally, we'll have a look at "forensics" on files with corrupted character encodings and how to repair them.

Category: Mathematics

Over the course of 20 years, my father gave a large number of lectures as a professor of mathematics at the University of Augsburg. Derived from his lecture notes was a notable textbook on "Gewöhnliche Differenzialgleichungen" ("Ordinary Differential Equations") that was published by Elsevier and has firmly established itself as a standard reference in German-speaking countries. I was able to assure myself of the high quality of this book during exam preparations for my mathematics minor, which formed part of my physics master degree examinations in 2006. The subject area of this exam included Ordinary Differential Equations, even though I did not attend any lecture on this subject! Within a few weeks, I worked through my father's textbook by way of self-study and passed the exam with flying colors.

Category: Quantum Information

Admittedly, one of the most common uses of computers is to play computer games, and in no small part did games influence the historic development of computer hardware. For example, the primary purpose of today’s high-end graphics cards is to compute the complex graphics effects of 3D games. Almost as an afterthought, it has been made possible to harness this brute computational power for productive purposes: Using frameworks such as OpenCL or CUDA, graphics cards can provide huge computational speedups in specific areas such as cryptography, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics and distributed computing.

Category: 3D printing

Recently the Design Office of the University of Oxford acquired a 3D printer, and they offered free print-outs during the period of setting up their printer. This was a perfect opportunity for me to bring one of the abstract spherical functions appearing in my work to life. The function is closely related to the icosahedron, a regular polyhedron, in the sense that it has an icosahedral rotational symmetry. A more detailed description of the function as well as its relation to quantum mechanical entanglement can be found further below.

Category: LaTeX showcase

Here is the talk I gave at the annual Postgraduate Research Symposium of the University of Leeds on 30 June 2010. It uses the LaTeX beamer class for presentations together with some specific packages and templates. In this article I will explain these technical aspects of my presentation.

Category: Singapore

Between 2008 and 2010 I frequently visited Singapore, and between 2011 to 2014 I lived and worked in this multicultural city-state, primarily at the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Here I share some information that might be useful for fellow tourists and expats, focusing on practical information rather than stereotypes along the lines of "Disneyland with the death penalty".