This lecture is hosted by the Oxford Martin Programme on Bio-Inspired Quantum Technologies
Speaker: Professor Seth Lloyd, Principal Investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Abstract: Over the past decade, experimental evidence has accumulated that photosynthetic organisms are using quantum mechanics in a sophisticated fashion to attain high energy transport efficiency. This talk shows how this high efficienty arises from the interplay between coherence, decoherence, and static disorder.
All welcome
About the speaker
Professor Seth Lloyd is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1982, the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) and an MPhil in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984 under a Marshall Fellowship, and a PhD in Physics in 1988 from Rockefeller University under the supervision of Professor Heinz Pagels.
From 1988 to 1991, Professor Lloyd was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Professor Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since 1988, Professor Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Sante Fe Institute.
Professor Lloyd has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.
Professor Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.