2018 Pollock Memorial Lecture: Professor Andrea Morello

Join UNSW Sydney and the Royal Society of NSW as we celebrate Professor Andrea Morello, who was awarded the 2017 Pollock Memorial Lectureship for his ground-breaking research in quantum computing. The lecture will be held on Wednesday 2 May, followed by drinks and canapes in UNSW’s newly refurbished Roundhouse.

Engineering for understanding: how building quantum devices unveils the meaning of quantum mechanics

Over a century after the establishment of quantum mechanics, the popular – and sometimes even the professional – literature is still permeated by the myth that quantum is weird and no one understands it. Yet, the 21st century will probably go into history as the era of quantum engineering, when the peculiar effects allowed by quantum physics are harnessed to create unprecedented functionalities.

In this lecture, Professor Morello will illustrate how the ambitious project of building a quantum computer can help us gaining intimacy with the quantum world and, with it, deepen our conceptual and practical understanding of it.

About the Pollock Memorial Lectureship

The Pollock Memorial Lectureship has been awarded about every four years since 1949 and is sponsored by the University of Sydney and the Society in memory of Professor J.A. Pollock, Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney (1899-1922) and a member of the Society for 35 years.

Professor Morello was awarded the 2017 Pollock Lectureship for inventing and demonstrating all of the fundamental building blocks of a silicon quantum computer.

About Professor Andrea Morello

Professor Andrea Morello is a Professor of Quantum Engineering at UNSW Sydney and a Program Manager in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He grew up near Torino and graduated from the Politecnico di Torino in 1998. He then completed his PhD in the birthplace of low-temperature physics, the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratorium in Leiden, Netherlands, followed by a postdoc at UBC in Vancouver. He joined UNSW in late 2006. He and his team were the first in the world to demonstrate the operation of a single electron and a single nucleus quantum bit in silicon. They still hold the record for quantum memory time, and the most accurate demonstration of quantum entanglement in the solid state. For these achievements, Andrea was awarded a Eureka Prize (2011), the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year (2013), the David Syme Research Prize (2013), the NSW Science & Engineering Award (2014), and was the inaugural winner of the R. Landauer & C.H. Bennett Award for Quantum Computing (2017).