Prof Dan Browne

Professor of Physics

Dept of Physics & Astronomy

Faculty of Maths & Physical Sciences

Joined UCL: 1st Apr 2007

Research summary

My current research interests lie in the field of quantum information science. Quantum physics is well-known for its counter-intuitive features. Quantum information science aims to harness these for novel information processing tasks. I am understanding the phenomena in quantum physics which lie at the heart of quantum information protocols (such as "entanglement", the special correlated states which can occur in quantum systems) and the development models of quantum computation in which these features are exploited in different ways (such as measurement-based quantum computation). I am also interested in finding ways in which the difficulties of demonstrating and exploiting these phenomena in the laboratory can be overcome and

collaborate with several experimental groups. A popular article on my collaboration with Jian-Wei Pan's group in Hefei, China to demonstrate a quantum factoring algorithm using photons (particles of light) appeared recently in the popular science magazine "The New Scientist".

Education

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2004
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: Other higher degree, Master of Natural Science | 2000

Biography

I was an undergraduate at Imperial College London, where I gained an MSci in Physics in 2000. The third year of my degree was spent in the beautiful German city of Freiburg-im-Breigau, where my research project, in the group of Christoph Keitel, studied the quantum mechanical interaction of light and atoms. In 2000, I returned to Germany with a DAAD one-year research scholarship. It was here that I first started working on quantum computation, under the supervision of Hans Briegel. In the following year I returned to Imperial College to carry out my PhD under the supervision of Martin Plenio. My PhD thesis was entitled "Quantum Information Processing with Quantum Optical Systems". In 2004 I was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. While in Oxford I worked in both the Atomic and Laser Physics Group (in the Physics department) and the Quantum and Nanotechnology group (in the Materials department). Since summer 2007 I have been a lecturer in the Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Positronic Physics Group at UCL.

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