Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Hi, everybody. I'm hoping that someone will be able to answer my questions. How competitive is the field of quantum information theory (quantum computers, quantum algorithms, quantum cryptology etc...)? Are graduate slots hard to get? I would like to study quantum information in graduate school, but there are only a small number of professors working in the area, and most of them are at hard to get into institutions, e.g. caltech, mit, waterloo, UCSB, oxford, cambridge, etc (I'm American btw). I have good grades (math and physics major) and one research paper in computational physics, but I'm concerned that it won't be enough. Any advice?

If quantum information is really difficult to get into, I'd rather not risk being rejected by every school and end up having to take a year off from school; I'd rather just choose another field of study. My backup plan, and something I have a genuine interest in, is neuroengineering (bci's). Getting into the top schools in that field is not hard as long as you have good grades and some research.

Check out New Mexico. They have a great group there as well.

Hopefully I won't be offending anyone by saying this, but since when is Waterloo hard to get into? With their connections to IQC and PI, as well as large faculties in math and computer science, they'd be a good choice to try for. My impression is that QI theory is a rather small area thus far, because of the difficulty of the current open problems.

There is also one person in that area at UBC, who is slowly forming a group around himself. The best advice I can give would be to do some hardcore Internet research to find out what other places there are, maybe with smaller groups than MIT and the like. It might help to browse the arXiv and see where the authors of recent papers are located.

Univ of South Calif (EE) , LSU also have people working in QIT

sravanskarri wrote:Univ of South Calif (EE) , LSU also have people working in QIT

There is also a new faculty member (added like 2 years ago) at USC Physics that does QIT

In general, I think the best place to start whenever looking at a new field is finding a major conference in that field and seeing who the invited or major talks are, and going from there.

More specifically, Maryland has phenomenal QIT

Pittsburgh University.

Yah, in Canada there is Waterloo/IQC, UBC has a small group, and UCalgary also has a group. But actually you can probably study QI at most schools. Usually in condensed matter groups there is a least one professor (or more) who will cite interests in QI. Since QI is a relatively "new" field, there aren't too many faculty who studied QI specifically in grad school. But like I said, condensed matter people will often work in QI, and depending what area of QI you want to study you can probably find a number of quantum optics groups around too.

Cambridge has quite a large QI group - but they almost exclusively recruit from part III (a 9-month Masters course).