Altai summary
I’m back from Altai, the trip took 33 hours from door to door. Time to summarize things learned and impressions collected.
1. Qubits and nanomech grow closer and closer together. Recent works of NEC group in collaboration with Munich prove this.
2. Astafiev from the same NEC group bets to re-do all non-linear atomic optics with a qubit and is close to completion of this challenging plan. If accomplished, qubits as artificial atoms will acquire all the functionalities of traditional atoms. So we do not need old atoms anymore: we can safely replace them with qubits.
3. Theorists can be useful in revealing and studying problems the engineers of Intel corporation will enconter next year (talk of V. F. Lukichev, Institute of Physics and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences)
4. Varelii Vinokour from Argonne National Lab has made a major contribution to the art of scientific presentation. First half of his talk has been devoted to scrupulous description of wrongdoings of his scientific opponents. He also mention that these wrongdoings were instrumental for his accelerated promotion to Argonne Distinguished Fellow. Unfortunately, I appeared too conservative for this novel type of talk and so-extended introduction did not help me to gasp the scientific side of the conflict described.
5. Fluctuation-dissipation theorem is wrong: this was a claim of prof. Averin from Stony Brook. Yet during the talk we have learned that FDT is ok: rather, there seem to be a problem with description of high-frequency thermal conductance with Kubo formalism.
