Professor Jonathan Jones

Position

Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Physics

Qualifications

MA DPhil

Academic Background

I arrived in Oxford in 1985 to read chemistry at Corpus Christi College and then moved to St Johns College for my DPhil. I moved to Merton College as a Junior Research Fellow working on applications of magnetic resonance in biochemistry, and spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley studying fundamental topics in magnetic resonance. On my return to Oxford I became interested in quantum information theory and moved to the department of physics, returning to Corpus Christi College as a research fellow. In 2002 I was appointed as University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Brasenose.

Undergraduate Teaching

As organising tutor I oversee all physics teaching in Brasenose, and personally teach about a quarter of the course, including mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, and quantum information theory.

Research Interests

Quantum Information Processing and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

Quantum information processing is the combination of quantum mechanics (the underlying physical theory describing the universe at the atomic scale) and classical information theory (the basic theory behind computers and telecommunication systems) to produce entirely new types of information processing techniques and devices. The most famous example is quantum computers, which could in principle solve certain problems almost infinitely faster than current classical devices.

Although the theory of QIP is fairly well understood, actually building useful quantum computers is difficult. Liquid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) provides an ideal test bed for building small devices and studying how they work, and we have been following this route for about twenty five years.

Early research concentrated on implementing simple quantum algorithms, but subsequently we have concentrated on more fundamental questions: firstly, how one can perform accurate quantum logic with imperfect equipment; secondly, how one can prepare NMR quantum computers in pure initial states without cooling them down to very low temperatures; and thirdly, how one can implement quantum logic gates without the need to selectively address individual nuclei.

In addition to this main area I also continue studying applications of NMR in chemistry and biochemistry, and more recently the transfer of ideas from the physical sciences into the social sciences.

Publications include

Implementation of a quantum algorithm on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer, J. A. Jones and M. Mosca, Journal of Chemical Physics 109, 1648-1653 (1998)

Implementation of a quantum search algorithm on a quantum computer, J. A. Jones, M. Mosca and R. H. Hansen, Nature 393, 344-346 (1998).

Geometric quantum computation with NMR, J. A. Jones, V. Vedral, A. Ekert and G. Castagnoli, Nature 403, 869-871 (2000).

Preparing high purity initial states for nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computing, M. S. Anwar, D. Blazina, H. A. Carteret, S. B. Duckett, T. K. Halstead, J. A. Jones, C. M. Kozak, and R. J. K. Taylor, Physical Review Letters 93, 040501 (2004).

Quantum Information Processing with Delocalized Qubits under Global Control, J. Fitzsimons, L. Xiao, S. C. Benjamin and J. A. Jones, Physical Review Letters 99, 030501 (2007).

Magnetic field sensing beyond the standard quantum limit using 10-spin NOON states, J. A. Jones, S. D. Karlen, J. Fitzsimons, A. Ardavan, S. C. Benjamin, G. A. D. Briggs and J. J. L. Morton, Science 324, 1166 (2009).

Quantum correlations which imply causation, J. Fitzsimons, J. A. Jones, and V. Vedral, Scientific Reports 5, 18281 (2015)

Mapping Mutations in Legislation: A Bioinformatics Approach, R. M. Dixon and J. A. Jones, Parliamentary Affairs 72, 21 (2019)

The Fellowship: Interviewed

The Quantum Computing Game

Click here to read an interview with Professor Jones by Olivia Gordon from Oxford Today

Email address

jonathan.jones@bnc.ox.ac.uk  

Links

http://nmr.physics.ox.ac.uk