Mark Wilde: USC PhD Candidate Exploiting Quantum Mechanics As We Know It

January 29, 2008

Mark M. Wilde hails from Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. He attended Jesuit High School where he not only studied Latin and Greek, but also participated in choir and sports teams including basketball, wrestling, and track and field. Throughout high school, his rock band "Obezag" performed at several venues in New Orleans and recorded two CDs at Festival Recording Studios. He pursued baccalaureate studies in computer engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. During this time, he also recorded a seven-song solo project CD called "Wisewood" at Free Spirit Studios in Dallas, Texas. After graduating from Texas A&M, he obtained a Master's of Science degree at Tulane University in New Orleans with special focus in speech and signal processing. He is currently completing the Ph.D. program in Electrical Engineering at USC with special focus in quantum computing and communication. He has published journal articles and preprints in quantum communication theory and has presented at several quantum conferences including QEC07 at USC.

Mark spoke with USC Stevens about the work he and his team are pursuing within quantum communications, read the interview below.

Help us understand what you are up to:

My collaborators, Todd Brun and Hari Krovi, and I are trying to find novel ways to exploit the principles of quantum mechanics to code information for a quantum communication system. Information inevitably undergoes errors during transmission because the physical carriers of information interact with the surrounding environment. Coding information in a redundant fashion helps to protect it from these interactions. We specifically exploit entanglement shared between a transmitter and a receiver to aid in the coding of quantum information.

What drives you to continue pursuing this area of study?

The thought that people may one day implement these ideas in future communication systems.

Describe how your work might impact peoples lives, now and in the future.

This method for cleaning up noisy entangled bits should have a profound impact on the way we communicate in the future. Experiments by other researchers have already demonstrated long-distance entanglement. Two European Space Agency stations separated by 144 km on the Canary Islands established entanglement between photons, but the resulting entanglement from these experiments was noisy.

We can use our method to clean up a set of noisy entangled bits, and the resulting noiseless entangled bits will be useful for a quantum communication task such as two parties sharing a secure message. One could imagine our method being used in the quantum networks of the future.

How did you come up with the idea?

Todd Brun, Igor Devetak, and Min-Hsiu Hsieh had an existing structure for formulating entanglement-assisted quantum codes. We exploited this structure and another structure for formulating quantum convolutional codes to create our protocol for cleaning up noisy entanglement. The resulting theory is useful on its own and represents an advance in quantum coding theory. We find it interesting that we can employ the Viterbi algorithm in the process.

What is the next step in the innovation process for you (and how might people help)?

Several companies are now implementing quantum devices for secret communication.
The next step is to see how our theory can improve secret communication between two parties and implement the ideas in a practical system such as a linear-optical device.

What mistake taught you the most?

I would not say that there was one individual mistake in creating this theory. The process of creating a general theory involves many mistakes that one learns from.

What is the one innovation you cant live without?

A cell phone.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?

I like to play basketball, guitar, beach volleyball, and eat extremely spicy tacos from El Taurino on Hoover St.

What do you wish you would have invented?

The electric guitar.

Any tips for aspiring innovators?

Never give up.

What is the most fun youve ever had?

Playing beach volleyball is probably the thing I like the most.

Three favorite things about LA:

Beach volleyball, hiking trails, and USC football!!!!


Website:
http://www.markwilde.com

Journal articles and preprints:

http://arxiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Wilde_M/0/1/0/all/0/1

Quantum Error Correction Conference at USC

http://qserver.usc.edu/qec07/

Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology at USC

http://cqist.usc.edu/