PhD student Ed Deacon tell us all about the CDT's recent trip to Australia:

"Back in February, a number of QET Labs and QE-CDT travelled to Sydney to attend the Quantum Australia conference, hosted by the Sydney Quantum Academy, and to visit various research groups, institutions and companies.

The conference started with a careers event with many companies in attendance followed by a careers panel. We heard from a mixture of academics and people working in industry on topics including near-term applications of quantum sensing, the national quantum strategies of Australia and the UK, and a personal highlight being a talk from Prof Stephanie Simmons. Prof Simmons, Chief Quantum Officer* and Founder of Photonic Inc, spoke about the companies quantum computing architecture based on a defect centre in silicon – the T centre - and presented some recent results

We met with some government representatives from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources including Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, who were interested to learn about how the QE-CDT PhD operates and our experiences as PhD students. No doubt they picked up many excellent tips about how to create great PhD programmes owing to the venerable Bristol QE-CDT

Beth Puzio and Lewis Wooltorton both did QET Labs proud giving excellent “Pitch Your Research” talks to a panel of judges. Sadly neither of them won (robbed if you ask me) but had some good questions. Over the course of the conference we all presented posters on our projects which invited some good discussions with attendees.

Following the conference, we ventured out to visit CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, to tour their labs, where they hold many international standards for things like the kilogram, and heard about their quantum research in communications and materials.

Next up was Macquarrie University’s Photonics Research Centre where we toured their labs and met with Prof Michael Steel. He chaired a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging whiteboard discussion session with us and students and postdocs from Macquarrie on various aspects of quantum optics.

Continuing the round trip of Sydney’s universities, we went to it’s namesake University of Sydney to visit the Quantum Integration Laboratory where we met with Dr John Batholomew and his group who are researching erbium defect centres as quantum memories and emitters for quantum networks. We also had a lab tour of the ion trapping group there who were developing traps that define qudits and were exploring non-Gaussian state generation with the system. We also met with Prof David Reilly in his capacity as an employee of Microsoft to hear about their work in developing low-temperature integrated electronics for use with gate-defined silicon quantum dots.

There were some great opportunities to network with other PhD students from around Australia at a drinks hosted by Quantum Women and an event at the Quantum Terminal, the physical centre of the Sydney Quantum Academy. At the latter, Jaya Sagar and I took part in a 3-Minute-Thesis competition which Jaya deservingly won with her great presentation.

We also met with BTQ at the Quantum Terminal, a start-up company investigating, among other things like PQC, using (Aaronson and Arkhipov style) Boson sampling to perform the Proof-of-Work process in blockchain consensus.

Last but not least, we visited Diraq at UNSW (University of New South Wales) who are a quantum computing company developing gate-defined silicon quantum dots. We had the chance to speak to lots of their team members, had lab and clean room tours, and heard a presentation about their architecture and future roadmap."