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Physicists around the world are searching for the best way to realize a quantum computer. Now scientists of the team around Stefan Kuhr and Immanuel Bloch at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching/Munich) took a decisive step in this direction. They could address and change the spin of single atoms with laser light and arrange them in arbitrary patterns. In this way, the physicists strung the atoms along a line and could directly observe their tunnelling dynamics in a "racing duel" of the atoms.

Researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria and the Technische Universität München in Germany have reported their findings, which will solve a long-standing problem in the design of micro- and nanoelectromechanical resonators, in the journal Nature Communications. The research team developed a finite-element-based numerical solver capable of predicting the design-limited damping of almost arbitrary mechanical resonators to resolve this problem.

The 2011 QIPC Young Investigator Award will be presented to an outstanding young researcher in the field of Quantum Information Processing and Communication during the QIPC international conference at ETH Zürich, September 5-9, 2011.

The award consists of a diploma and a lump sum of 4000€.

The award will be given to a researcher under the age of 35 for the best research recently published or presented at a major conference. Eligible researchers must be less than 35 years old on the 1st of September 2011.

The original motivation to build a quantum computer came from Feynman, who imagined a machine capable of simulating generic quantum mechanical systems—a task that is believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a machine could have far-reaching applications in the simulation of many-body quantum physics in condensed-matter, chemical and high-energy systems.
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