Quantum prize

  • September 26, 2012
Quantum prize

Gates Cambridge alumnus Peter Brereton has been awarded a prestigious National Research Council Research Associateship at the US Navy Research Laboratory in Washington DC.

A Gates Cambridge alumnus has been awarded a prestigious National Research Council Research Associateship at the US Navy Research Laboratory in Washington DC.
The Award for Peter Brereton [2001] is for a postdoctoral fellowship for up to three years.  He will be working in the Electronic Materials Branch researching fundamental quantum optical processes in semiconductor nanostructures.
The NRC Fellowship allows early career scientists and engineers to work on breakthrough research focused on solving the biggest challenges facing science and technology in the US. 
Peter, who did a PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge, says: “I will be able to work with a world-renowned group in the design, growth and
optical control of semiconductor optoelectronic nano-scale devices.  We will be working on using extremely short laser pulses to control the electronic states of single quantum systems in infrastructures that are promising candidates for solid state quantum computers.”
His research at Cambridge focused on the impurity sites that occur in semiconductor quantum dots. He says that if scientists can learn how to control these they will be able to build scaleable quantum computers which will be many times faster than any current computer.

Picture credit: Creative Commons and Giorgio Brida.

Latest News

The path to democratising algorithmic whispers

Cong Minh Nguyen is an economist who wants to tell stories about how market systems shape people’s lives and how they can be redesigned to expand fairness and opportunity.  He […]

How can we reduce the impact of anti-microbial resistance?

John Wang [2026] believes that the efficiency of a drug treatment is not solely determined by the drug itself, but by how precisely its delivery, targeting and release can be […]

Two Scholars appointed to leading energy think tank

Two Gates Cambridge Scholars have been appointed Assistant Directors of a prestigious energy think tank on sustainable energy solutions. Ramit Debnath and Kamiar Mohaddes are two of the three new […]

Gates Cambridge: Impact in human rights

Gates Cambridge Scholars have had a big impact in the field of human rights, from international law to women’s and indigenous rights. Many Scholars are involved in some way in […]