This summer school on quantum information marks the 10th anniversary of the highly renowned series. Previous events (2001-2009) were held in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and Waterloo. It follows the tradition of educating young researchers (prospective and current graduate students, as well as post-docs) on the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information science and brings together the world's experts from different areas.

This year the emphasis will be on quantum algorithms and models of quantum computation, with particular attention to mathematical methods. We are planning to include one advanced topic which is not so traditional for a summer school in quantum information, namely “Foundational aspects of quantum mechanics”.

The importance of quantum information was first widely recognized in 1982 when Feynman conjectured that a quantum computer would efficiently simulate quantum systems, while a universal Turing machine (“classical computer”) could not. A first breakthrough came in the mid-1990s, when Peter Shor showed that the quantum computer could efficiently determine the factors of large numbers, whereas this problem is believed to be intractable on a classical computer. Since then, a burst of research activities on the quantum realm of communication, models of computation and algorithms, and implementation of many proposed quantum information processing tasks, had rapidly given rise to a new subfield of science – quantum information science.

The Summer School will consist of a 5-day block and a 4-day block. Embedded between these two blocks, the Workshop on quantum algorithms, computational models, and foundations of quantum mechanics will take place, thus giving students a rare learning opportunity to see real-world applications of quantum information science research.

Scientific organizers

• Barry Sanders, University of Calgary
• Robert Raussendorf, University of British Columbia
• Petr Lisonek, Simon Fraser University
• Mohammad Amin, D-Wave Systems Inc., Burnaby, BC
• Tzu-Chieh Wei, University of British Columbia
• Pradeep Kiran Sarvepalli, University of British Columbia