Raymond Laflamme

Information processing is pervasive, it has changed the way we do science, the way we entertain ourselves, the structure of the economy, and ultimately who we are. This information revolution has happened because of the incredible progress made to manipulate larger and larger amounts of information by shrinking the size of transistors. As we move toward that scale, we need a better approximation to the laws of physics than the one provided by classical mechanics, we need quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is presently a hindrance to push the limits of the size of transistors as we try to keep computing classically. In the last 20 years, physicists and computer scientists have discovered that we could instead take advantage of quantum mechanics. The goal of my work is to harness quantum mechanical effects and use them for information processing. It turns out that this leads to new mind-boggling devices that seem much more powerful that their classical counterpart. A large fraction of my energy is focused on finding and developing methods to control, manipulate and make quantum information robust against noise and imperfection that are present in realistic devices. I also attempt to understand why these devices are so powerful and try to find new applications for them.