BigQ was officially inaugurated on 12 January 2018 at a ceremony involving mobile-controlled squeezing, James Bond, cluster states, and diamond cheese.
Our Center of Excellence was formally launched on 12 January and was inaugurated at a colourful ceremony on the same day.
The event opened not with a bang, but with a very low noise. Søren Peter Olesen, Director of DNRF (Danish National Research Foundation), remote-controlled a mirror in one of our labs, trying to bring the noise of a laser beam into the quantum regime. After getting a feel for the sensitivity of the mobile phone interface, he succeeded in entering the quantum world long enough that the Center could officially be declared open.
This nerve-wrecking moment (particularly for Tobias and Christian who set up the performance) was followed by talks by Søren Peter Olesen, Anders Bjarklev (President of DTU), Jane Hvolbæk Nielsen (Director of DTU Physics), Ulrik Lund Andersen (Center leader), and Mikkel Vilsbøll Larsen (PhD student). Anders Bjarklev felt like he was part of a James Bond movie with ever-lasting diamonds and the big Q's gimmicks, while Mikkel Larsen gave everyone a sense of the excitement we share about our field when presenting his PhD project on optical cluster states.
As a final part of the official program, the winner and two runners-up of an internal bigQ image competition were announced. Casper Rubæk Breum won 1st prize with his "Two mirrors," while Ilya Radko with "Diamond cheese slice" and Joost van der Heijden with "Red vacuum" got honourable mentions.
Read more about the event in DNRF's news story.