Prof. Virginia Lorenz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

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Abstract: Quantum computing and quantum communication applications often require the carriers of information, or qubits, to have specific properties. Photonic quantum states are good carriers of information because they are robust to environmental fluctuations, but generating photons with just the right properties is still a challenge. I will present our work on generating, engineering and characterizing photonic quantum states for quantum applications.

Brief Bio: Professor Virginia (Gina) Lorenz received her B.A. in physics magna cum laude and mathematics in 2001 and completed her Ph.D. in physics in 2007 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her thesis work focused on measuring and modelling the transition from reversible to irreversible dephasing of electronic coherence in dense atomic vapors. From 2007-2009 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the University of Oxford, where she worked on implementations of quantum memories in atomic and solid-state systems. From 2009-2014, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware. She joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, where her research group performs experiments in quantum optics, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, and optical magnetometry.

Prof. Lorenz’s website