Raymond Laflamme

Raymond Laflamme is a Canadian physicist and the co-founder and current director of the Institute for Quantum Computing. He is also an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Biography

Laflamme was born in Quebec City in 1960 to a medical doctor father and a dietician mother. He finished his undergraduate education in the Universite Laval in Canada and went on to do his doctoral studies at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in the University of Cambridge. His PhD advisor was Stephen Hawking. Hawking has mentioned in his book A Brief History of Time that at that time Laflamme, along with Don Page was responsible for convincing him that time does not reverse in a contracting universe. ^[1]

After completing his PhD, Laflamme did stints as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia as well as Cambridge before joining the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His work during this time was ranked amongst the Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year from the journal Science in 1998. In 2001, he joined the newly founded Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Physics and Astronomy department of the affiliated University of Waterloo, where he and Michele Mosca founded the Institute for Quantum Computing. ^[2] In 2003, he became director of the Quantum Information program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; he also remains director of QuantumWorks, Canada's national research consortium on Quantum Information Science and holds the Canadian Research Chair in Quantum Information.^[3]

Scientific Work

Though he started his career working in quantum gravity and cosmology, Raymond Laflamme is known as a pioneering scientist in Quantum Information Theory. While at Los Alamos, he was involved with the experimental implementation of quantum information processing devices using nuclear magnetic resonance. He is also credited with developing a theoretical scheme for efficient quantum computation using linear optics, along with Emmanuel Knill. Laflamme laid down the mathematical framework for quantum error-correcting codes, which has since developed into a broad topic of research. With colleagues Miquel, Paz and Zurek, he constructed the most compact quantum error correcting code. ^[4]

Honors

• Medaille Grande Escolle de l’Association des Diplomes de l’Universite Laval in 2005 ^[5]
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008
• Canadian Premier's Discovery Award in the field of Natural Sciences and Engineering in 2008 ^[6]
• Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2011 ^[7]
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 ^[8]

Media

Laflamme was a featured scientist in the award-winning ^[9] documentary, "The Quantum Tamers" ^[10] which was presented by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and saw its Canadian premiere in October 2009 at the Quantum to Cosmos festival in Waterloo, Ontario. Laflamme was also a participant in The Agenda With Steve Paikin discussion panel, "Wired 24/7" with Neil Gershenfeld, Jaron Lanier, Neal Stephenson, and Tara Hunt at the Quantum to Cosmos festival.

References

External links

• The Agenda With Steve Paikin: Wired 24/7?