Abstract for Talk 1:

The invention of the laser provided a coherent source of light at high peak powers and was the necessary tool to open the world of nonlinear optics. One such example is two-photon absorption, which scales quadratically with the incident photon flux. A new paradigm began with the ability to generate more complicated states of light which possess novel correlations between photons. In this talk we begin with a review of the emerging field of “quantum nonlinear optics” and the controversy surrounding it. We then develop a model to analyze the interaction between quantum states of light and rubidium. We show that with strongly correlated pairs, two-photon absorption scales linearly with incident flux and can significantly enhance the rate of two-photon absorption compared to classical light in the low flux limit.

Abstract for Talk 2:

State Preparation is an important preliminary step for many quantum algorithms, such as ground state energy estimation and simulation, however existing methods have high qubit overheads or have difficult to analyze runtimes. We are currently exploring new methods that utilize existing Hamiltonian simulation techniques and properties of random matrices to prepare thermal states of a given Hamiltonian. This talk will cover classical thermal state preparation, followed by an overview of existing quantum techniques, and finally the route we are taking to solving this problem.