12:00pm – 12:20pm: Daniel Higginbottom 

Silicon colour centres for quantum networks

The performance of quantum networks for long-distance communication, sensing, and distributed quantum computing will be contingent upon the quality of their light-matter interconnects. For networks at scale, these interconnects should be manufacturable and deployable. Solid-state colour centres are single-photon emitters which may offer optically-coupled spin qubit registers for deployable entanglement distribution networks. Of the potential semiconductor hosts, silicon is an ideal platform for commercial quantum technologies. It is a “semiconductor vacuum” with record-setting spin qubit performance, and silicon nanofabrication is an advanced industrial process and the backbone of the microelectronics industry. Although they were neglected until quite recently, silicon colour centres are now established as a quantum platform with technological appeal: they emit in or near the optical telecommunications bands, host intrinsic spin qubit registers, and integrate directly with photonic and electronic circuits on chip. In this talk I will discuss progress in engineering networked silicon colour centre devices and identify emerging candidates from the rapidly expanding alphabet of silicon colour centres. I will summarize recent results with the T centre, a CCH defect in silicon, establishing key capabilities for quantum networks including efficient emission, memory qubit protection, and spectral emission tuning. These results illustrate how silicon colour centres may be deployed as an on-chip spin-photon quantum processor, and how these processors may be connected over optical fibre in a metropolitan-scale quantum internet.

12:20pm – 12:40pm: Saasha Joshi 

Data-Efficient Optimization of Black-Box Models Using Quantum Surrogates in Bayesian Optimization  

This talk presents Quantum Bayesian Optimization (QBO), a data-efficient framework for optimizing complex systems that are unknown or costly to evaluate. By leveraging quantum-enhanced models, QBO captures subtle correlations in domains such as game theory and finance, enabling faster identification of solutions with fewer evaluations. The talk also highlights Canada’s first Quantum Computing Sandbox (QCS) by FABrIC and CMC Microsystems, which aims to accelerate the adoption of quantum computing technology in Canada by providing technical expertise and enabling access to state-of-theart quantum computing platforms.