Postdoc Highlight: Sayonee Ray
December 4, 2020 - Gloria Cordova
When hiring four postdoctoral fellow in 2017 to work at CQuIC under the NSF funded Focused Research Hub in Theoretical Physics (FRHTP) project, CQuIC broadened its scope when it hired Dr. Sayonee Ray. Sayonee began work at CQuIC as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the FRHTP on October 1, 2020 and leaves CQuIC on January 1, 2021.
Dr. Sayonee Ray brought her expertise in theoretical condensed-matter physics and served CQuIC’s theoretical program in measurement-based quantum computation and related issues of entanglement. Working with Dr. Adrian Chapman (CQuIC graduate), and CQuIC Professors Ivan Deutsch and Akimasa Miyake teams they completed their work titled “Complexity of sampling bosonic atoms in the presence of weak interactions,” where it was shown that in the presence of weak interactions between the bosonic atoms, sampling complexity is close to that for the noninteracting. This work is part of the Google project on “Robust quantum complexity in the dynamics of Bose Hubbard model.” This project received the Google award fellowship last year. Sayonee collaborated with and mentored graduate student Gopi Muraleedharan on the “Efficient simulation of robust order parameters in interacting many body systems with noise,” also a part of the Google project that is soon to be completed. In related work, she collaborates with Professors Tameem Albash and Ivan Deutsch on studying how to efficiently simulate complex processes in the presence of decoherence based on phase space representations.
Sayonee could often be found in a corner of the Sunset Room of PAIS in remote communication with distant collaborators. She was engaged in her own condensed matter project, in collaboration with researchers at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Washington University St. Louis, studying transport properties and symmetry protected topological classes in low-dimensional superconductors. The project has been arxived this year and will be soon be submitted to a journal. She collaborated with Adrian Chapman at University of Sydney in a joint project which is again applying quantum information tools in known condensed matter models and studying localization. Sayonee presented invited talks at Boston University, LANL and Lawrence Livermore National lab.
Sayonee was the course coordinator and lecturer for PHY 500.001 Adv Sem: Statistical and many-body methods in Quantum information, where she organized and presented lectures for the advanced graduate course on statistical physics and condensed matter topics relevant for quantum information.
Sayonee says “As a CQuIC postdoc, I got this incredible opportunity of working in a new field of quantum information science (my PhD was in condensed matter physics). This itself is rare and I am very grateful for that. I got a chance to learn from the best in this field. I was given good balance of research freedom and guidance, and enormous support from my fellow postdocs and grad students. The FRHTP travel grant helped in networking and attending workshops/conferences. I could not have asked for a better postdoc experience.”
Beginning January 2021, Sayonee will be joining Roger Melko’s group as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. She will be working with researchers at Perimeter Institute and 1Qbit Technologies in the field of quantum simulation and quantum algorithms. CQuIC members extend best wishes to Dr. Sayonee Ray and will miss her presence at UNM.
