Building quantum machines out of light

Light has the remarkable capacity to reveal quantum features under ambient conditions, making exploration of the quantum world feasible in the laboratory and field. Further, the availability of high-quality integrated optical components makes it possible to conceive of large-scale quantum states by bringing together many different quantum light sources and manipulating them in a coherent manner and detecting them efficiently. By this route, we can envisage a scalable photonic quantum network that will facilitate the preparation of distributed quantum correlations among many light beams. This will enable a new regime of state complexity to be accessed - one for which it is impossible using classical computers to determine the structure and dynamics of the system. This is a new regime not only for scientific discovery, but also practical purpose: the same complexity of big quantum systems may be harnessed to perform tasks that are impossible using known future information processing technologies. For instance, ideal universal quantum computers may be exponentially more efficiently than classical machines for certain classes of problems, and communications may be completely secure. Photonic quantum machines will open new frontiers in quantum science and technology. 
 
____Bio_____
Ian Walmsley is the Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Oxford. In September 2018 he will take up the post of Provost at Imperial College London. He was educated at Imperial College, London, and The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester,
His work instigated the field of ultrafast quantum optics, with the aim to access quantum phenomena in ambient conditions paving the way to demonstrations of macroscopic quantum features of matter even at room temperature. 
His group's research covers a broad range of optical science and engineering, especially in the areas of ultrafast, nonlinear and quantum optics, with applications in quantum information processing. His group has contributed to the development of methods for characterizing quantum states, processes and measurements and applied these to the study of the generation and utilization of nonclassical light in quantum sensing, simulation and computing, and to the control of the interaction of quantum light and matter. He is known as the inventor of the SPIDER technique for ultrafast optical pulse characterization.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society (OSA), the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics (IoP). Currently he is President of the Optical Society, a member of the Board of Directors of Oxford University Innovation and Director of the Networked Quantum information Technologies (NQIT) Hub, the largest collaboration in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. He is a recipient of the APS Keithley Award and the IoP Young Medal.