On Saturday I’m heading off to Baltimore, Maryland, for CLEO/QELS, an international optics conference, where I’ll be giving a presentation entitled “Quantum gate characterization in an extended Hilbert space”, based on the paper with the same name (pre-print quant-ph/0411144). This is joint work with Tim Ralph, Geoff Pryde and Jeremy O’Brien.

Following the conference I’ll be heading to the UK, where I’ll spend two weeks visiting Ian Walmsley’s group in the Physics Department at Oxford University. I’m very excited about this and it should be a fantastic opportunity to work with new people with similar research interests, who are outstanding in their field.

Finally, following my visit to Oxford, I’m taking two weeks holiday leave to visit friends and family in Germany. With any luck I hope to briefly head down the the German Alps and climb a few peaks, most notably the Zugspitze (2964m), Germany’s highest mountain. I had originally intended to go to the French Alps and have a shot at Mt. Blanc (4810m), the highest mountain in Western Europe, however time was too short. I’ll leave it for next year, when I hope to be back in Europe again.