Public lecture:

Knots, World-lines
and
Quantum Computation

Professor Steve Simon,
Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford,
SFI ETS Walton Fellow, NUI Maynooth.

Tuesday 21st September, 18:00.

Academy House, Royal Irish Academy,
19 Dawson St. Dublin 2.

Over one hundred years ago physicists imagined that the beautiful mathematical theory of knots might be important in describing the most fundamental constituents of matter. While these initial attempts at drawing this connection were a failure from the physics perspective, from the mathematical perspective they were a great success. More recently, the connection of knots and physics has arisen again and appears to be heading for success. Thinking in 2 space+1 time dimensions, particle paths (or world-lines) can be interpreted as knots, and the amplitude for certain processes to occur reflects topological properties of that knot. While sounding rather exotic, we believe that such phases of matter not only exist, but have actually been observed in experiments, and could provide a uniquely practical route to building a "quantum" computer which could be used to perform certain calculations exponentially faster than any computer available today.

Professor Simon obtained his undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1989 and his PhD from Harvard in 1995. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT before becoming a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1997. In 2000 he was promoted to department head and for the next nine years he managed departments that researched topics ranging from Neuroscience to Quantum Computation to Semiconductor Lasers to Wireless Communications. In January of 2009 he moved to Oxford to become a professor. He has since learned to drink tea, but has yet to learn to appreciate clotted cream.