Newswise — In a special ceremony honouring Ontario's top, innovative scientists, Dr. Raymond Laflamme has received the prestigious Premier's Discovery Award for his contributions to natural sciences and engineering. This award's program, fostered by the Ministry of Research and Innovation, recognizes individual achievements by the province's most eminent senior researchers " accomplishments demonstrating Ontario's leadership in the globally competitive arena of scientific research.
Dr. Laflamme is a leader in the field of Quantum Information, an area of research merging our understanding of atoms and particles with information processing. A talented theorist and experimentalist, Dr. Laflamme approaches science from a unique perspective, pushing deep, fundamental understanding of the world around us while advancing interests in the development of new and potentially powerful quantum communications-related technologies. Specifically, Dr. Laflamme examines profound and mystifying phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to understand the quantum world better and harness natural abilities in atoms to store, compute, and transmit information in new and secure ways.
Laflamme and his colleagues are currently world record holders for controlling the most number of "qubits," or quantum bits, of information under verifiable circumstances. In addition to this achievement, as well as his many awards and honours, Dr. Laflamme is widely published throughout the research community, having written over 120 peer-reviewed papers " including those in Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters. His top 15 publications have generated over 3300 citations.
You can learn more about Dr. Laflamme's research, including how he controls qubits, by watching "Harnessing the Quantum World," his online Perimeter Institute Public Lecture at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/Public_Lectures/View_Past_Public_Lectures/About Raymond Laflamme
Raymond Laflamme obtained his PhD in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1988 under the direction of renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Dr. Laflamme is credited, along with Don Page, in changing Stephen Hawking's mind about the nature of time. Following positions as a Killam post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and a Research Fellow at Cambridge, Dr. Laflamme settled for nine years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and Technical Staff member.
In 2001, he was successfully recruited back to Canada by Mike Lazaridis to lead the Institute of Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and as a founding member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In addition to being a founding and ongoing member of Perimeter Institute, Dr. Laflamme is also Scientific Director of QuantumWorks, Canada's quantum information research consortium; Director of the Quantum Information Processing program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); and a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Quantum Information.
About Perimeter Institute
Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent, non-profit, scientific research and educational outreach organization where international scientists cluster to push the limits of our understanding of physical laws and calculate new ideas about the very essence of space, time, matter, and information. The award-winning research centre provides a multi-disciplinary environment to foster research in areas of Cosmology, Particle Physics, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Information, Superstring Theory, and related areas. The Institute, located in Waterloo, Ontario, also provides a wide array of educational outreach activities for students, teachers, and members of the general public across the country and beyond in order to share the joy of scientific research, discovery, and innovation.
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