Ryan O'Farrell will be discussing The Math of Quantum Computing.

Welcome to the 2025-26 UChicago Quantum Society! Hope your first week went well. It was wonderful seeing you all at the Engagement Expo and Liftoff this week. We're looking forward to getting to know you all a bit better (or, rather, you getting to know all of us a bit better) at our very first meeting, held this Wednesday 10/8 from 5:30-6:30 PM in Kersten Physics Teaching Center (KPTC) 106. 

This week, the board will take some time to introduce themselves and talk about our programming for the year. Some stuff to be on the lookout for:

• Our weekly EDUCATION SERIES, which aims to get people with limited background in quantum physics up to speed on the background they'll need in order to engage with modern advances in quantum technology. 

• Our JOURNAL CLUB, in which we read a paper every week outlining a recent development in quantum science/technology and discuss it.

• GUEST SPEAKERS, PANELS, STUDY BREAKS, and more! 

To stay updated on our events, you can follow our Instagram, join our Discord, or just check your email each week for updates! We're looking forward to a great year ahead, and we can't wait to get to know all of you!

I hope you all sincerely enjoyed what this year had to offer in terms of UCQ programming. We were certainly happy to see all your wonderful, confused-but-getting-there faces at our ed series lectures! 

This week, we will be saying goodbye to our longtime presidents Rohan and Shivam and introducing our new board at our study break! It'll be a fun opportunity to escape from your studies, enjoy some snacks, and hang out with fellow quantum-oriented folks. 5:30 PM on Wednesday 5/21 in ERC 219--looking forward to seeing you all there!!

We're in the home stretch! Spring has finally hit Chicago–it's sunny out (sort of), warm out (sort of), and the flowers are blooming (okay, no caveats on that one). However, as a current Quantum II student, the only "spring" I care about is the 3D isotropic harmonic oscillator and using it to model structures of atoms. Oh, by the way, speaking of atoms...

This week our co-president, Shivam, is going to be lecturing on experimental atomic physics! Get ready for "Intro to AMO Experiments: Using Atoms for Quantum Technologies" on Wednesday, 5/14, at 5:30 PM in KPTC 206. Be there or be square!

This week's lecture will be a follow-up to Rohan's last week: we'll go more in-depth on quantum error correction. As usual, it will be at 5:30 PM on Wednesday, 5/7 in KPTC 206. See you there!

If you are interested in Quantum? Join us for the 5th Annual Quantum Recruiting Forum on April 24th! 

The annual Chicago Quantum Recruiting Forum brings together the rising generation of quantum scientists and engineers. This forum is an outstanding opportunity for students and trainees across the STEM disciplines interested in pursuing quantum information through physics, computing, or engineering to catalyze their careers. Participants will have the opportunity to connect with one another as well as leaders in the field, exploring quantum careers and academic pathways through an experiential immersion in quantum innovation.

Registration is now open! Register Here. Please note that pre-registration is required to attend this event.

If you have any questions about the Quantum Recruiting Forum, please don't hesitate to reach out to qrf@uchicago.edu

First, I'm thrilled to share that UCQ members Alice Wang and Ryan O’Farrell placed first on the Alice and Bob Advancement track and second overall at YQuantum—an incredible achievement. Congratulations to them and their team!

Second, for tonight’s ed series, Rohan will be covering quantum noise and error correction. These topics are hugely important to developments in quantum computing today, so I’d highly recommend you check this week’s lecture out. As always, 5:30 PM in KPTC 206!

I saw that many of you have already gotten some of your weekly dose of quantum by attending the Alain Aspect events–which led me to wonder who the first UCQ alum to win a Nobel Prize will be! (Statistically, at least one of you is likely to get one.... all I ask is that you remember me and my beautiful emails when you're famous.)

This week's ed series will provide some invaluable setup for higher-level topics in later weeks–Emilio will be giving an introduction to density matrices at 5:30 PM on 4/9  in KPTC 206. Hope to see you there!

This week’s ed series, still in KPTC 309, will cover some elementary quantum algorithms. See you at 5:30 on Wednesday!

We’re midway through the seventh week of Winter Quarter, so midterms season is almost over! (Don’t think too hard about what that implies about how soon finals are. Let’s live in the moment.) 

This week, we’ll be discussing multi-qubit gates and GHZ states. We’re going to be in a different location this week–KPTC 309–so make sure you head there at 5:30 PM today (2/19) for some fun physics and, as always, Insomnia Cookies.

Tonight, in lieu of our ed series, we will be hosting a study break in KPTC 206 at 5:30 PM!!! We hope to give a brief respite from all the awesome and fun math/physics/compsci your brains have surely been inundated with in class over the past week. Insomnia Cookies will be provided, as per usual. See you there!

Continuing from last week, we’ll be hosting another ed series tonight going over logic gates and entanglement at 5:30 PM in KPTC 206. This review is going to be really helpful as we move forward into more complex topics, so be sure to come.

We will be starting our education series up again this Wednesday 1/22 at 5:30 PM in KPTC 206 with a quick review of some topics from last quarter and a more in-depth discussion of multi-qubit quantum computing. Excited to see you all there!

This week’s ed series, the final one of the quarter, is a big one. We’re going to get at the heart of the question we’ve been teasing all quarter: we’ll be talking all about the premise, goal, and model of quantum computing. 

Some questions we aim to answer:

- What could quantum computing do?

- How do we do it?

- How does it compare to classical computing?

- Where does the computational power of QC come from?

Plus, we’re going to get into some real mathematical rigor (don’t be scared–there are no tests or p-sets, this is just learning for learning’s sake. If you don’t understand it, that’s okay!) Review the lin-alg primer (attached below). We’re also going to talk about the direction the ed series is going to go in next quarter, now that we’ve covered the basics and are ready to get into some of the real nitty-gritty. This is the most important lecture of the quarter. 

You are superstars for coming to these lectures. You’re all doing so well! Don’t lose steam now!

5:30 P.M., KPTC 206, 11/20. Insomnia cookies as always. Be there or be square.

Last week, we covered superposition, quantum circuit diagrams, and quantum gates such as the X gate, the H gate, and the CX gate. Next week, we will continue with our discussion of two-qubit circuits, where we will introduce the concept of entanglement. In the meantime, I leave you with IBM’s quantum circuit simulator, where you can build your circuit. Using the gates introduced last time, make a circuit to create a two-qubit state that measures |00> 50% of the time and |11> 50% of the time. 

This week’s lecture will be led by Minh and Emilio in KPTC 206 at 5:30 PM. We’re excited to see you all again!

We will be continuing our education series tonight at 5:30 PM in KPTC 206. Lecture 2 will cover the Stern-Gerlach experiment, the Bloch sphere, quantum entanglement, and we’ll do a brief overview of Hilbert space. Don’t worry if you missed the last lecture–the lecture notes are attached below. 

If last lecture scared you a little (or, conversely, if it wasn’t scary enough), please fill out our feedback form to let us know what you thought. The point of this series is to teach you, not to confuse or bore you, and getting feedback is the only way we can make sure we’re doing that.

Rohan and Shivam are going to introduce classical and quantum information models, explaining quantum entanglement and superposition along the way.

It is highly recommended that you review the linear algebra primer we sent out before attending the lecture. It makes a lot of the concepts easier to grasp, and will be useful for you to refer to during the lecture itself. 

It was great to see all the new faces at the RSO fair, and we’re excited to welcome new members to UC Quantum! As such, we are hosting an interest meeting this Wednesday, 9th October at 5:30 pm in Kersten Physics Teaching Center 106, and a first "journal club" meeting on Friday that we will provide more details for at the interest meeting.

A little bit about us: We are the home of quantum technology at UChicago, which includes quantum computing, sensing, simulation, and more. Throughout the year, we host numerous programs, projects, and events to support undergraduate interest and learning. We cater to all levels, whether you have no idea what a “qubit” is or are already reading academic papers.

We believe there’s no better place to be interested in quantum than here. UChicago is at the forefront of the quantum revolution: we are the headquarters of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Duality accelerator, and have numerous institutional partnerships. We're determined to translate the buzzing quantum scene here to the undergraduate community, and we hope you'll come to learn more about how we plan to do that.

We'll be continuing our Education Series Lecture on Shor's Algorithm at today's meeting. Even if you weren't able to attend the first lecture, we still encourage you to show up. 

Shor's Algorithm is one of the few known quantum algorithms with compelling potential applications and strong evidence of superpolynomial speedup compared to best known classical algorithms. (Wikipedia)

As usual, we hope to see you at 5:30pm in KPTC 206.

We are very excited to announce one of biggest quantum events at UChicago of the entire year: the Quantum Recruiting Forum on April 11th!

It is a big event bringing all members of the quantum community from academia to industry. The forum will include a speaker panel, networking opportunities, workshops, and more!

Here are some companies of note that will be in attendance:

·  Applied Materials

·  Bluefors

·  Corning Optical Communications

·  EeroQ Corporation

·  Error Corp.

·  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

·  HRL Laboratories LLC

·  Infleqtion

·  JPMorgan Chase

·  QuantCAD LLC

·  Quantum Machines

·  Qubit by Qubit

·  Wolfram

If you are interested in workshops, such as with Wolfram research, please register here.

We're excited to announce that we'll be covering Shor's Algorithm in our next two education series meetings. Since the lectures will largely build off of each other, we highly recommend that you attend both sessions.

Shor's Algorithm is one of the few known quantum algorithms with compelling potential applications and strong evidence of superpolynomial speedup compared to best known classical algorithms. (from Wikipedia)

We hope to see you at 5:30pm this Wednesday and next Wednesday in KPTC 206!

Soumik Ghosh, a PhD student under Professor William Fefferman, will be giving a talk about Sharp Complexity Phase Transitions Generated by Entanglement (arXiv 2212.10582). He will discuss fundamental connections between the entanglement present in quantum systems and the complexity of simulating them classically.