• What is the QuTech blog?

This is a blog website written and edited by members of QuTech, including Master and PhD students, postdocs, technicians, PIs and alumni. Occasionally we also invite guests whose research or career are of interest to the quantum community.

Our posts are written by individual authors, (usually lightly) edited and then published by our editors. The blog editors are a small group of PhD students at QuTech.

• Whose opinions do the posts represent?

As editors, we aim at giving every member of QuTech a stage to voice their opinions. This means each blog post reflects the author’s personal view of their research or experience, not those of their PI and certainly not of QuTech management. Even our QuTech colleagues may or may not share the authors’ opinions. Since the authors and editors volunteer their spare time to bring you these posts, we hope the readers understand the personal nature of the writing. We thank QuTech and its communications team for hosting the website for us, but wish to clarify that they are not part of our writing/editorial process. Our goal is to maintain a degree of independence and bring a more humanly voice to the science we do compared to papers or press releases. For any official source of information, we refer the reader to the main QuTech website.

• What do we write about?

To members of QuTech, we hope to make this blog the place where you can voice all those things that make life at QuTech so exciting but don’t quite fit into the formal jacket of your next paper. This will be a place where we talk to other people about our science and our lives within science on a more human level. The main things we would like to achieve with this blog are “quantum literacy” – there is a lot of misunderstanding and “hype” out there and we would like to offer a clear voice that cuts through the confusion – and also communicating what might be best called the “playfulness” inherent in scientific endeavour in general and at a cutting edge research field in particular. All of us are here because we are fascinated by discovery and love doing science and it would be great if we could manage to share some of that joy with the rest of the world.
Examples of good topics to write about include:
• A piece of science from another group that you find really interesting;
• Your experience with some piece of equipment (e.g. you installed dil-fridges);
• A clear explanation of some concept in quantum information (e.g. non- local correlations, Bell tests, . . . ).

• Who is the intended audience?

The intended audience is people interested in quantum computing. This ranges from other scientists who are not necessarily in the field of quantum information to interested laymen (who have some understanding of physics). This means that we encourage the authors to not be afraid of going ‘deep’ or into technical subjects, but to avoid jargons or overly formal mathematics.

• What if a reader disagrees with a post they read?

If it’s a factual or technical disagreement, please contact the author to point it out. The research topics at QuTech are broad enough such that it is unrealistic to expect our editors to spot all inaccuracies, if any, in a post about a different field. If you cannot come to an agreement with the author on whether/how to revise the post, or if you hold a different opinion than the author, we strongly encourage you to write down your comment and send it to us for publishing as a response piece.

• Contacting us

To get in touch with an editor or the author of a post, you can search for their name on the main QuTech website and see their email address. The current editors are Anne Marije Zwerver, Guanzhong Wang, Aletta Meinsma, Sebastian de Bone and Siddharth Singh.