Stephan Hoyer
Ph.D. Candidate in Physics, UC Berkeley
| 366 LeConte Hall University of California Berkeley, CA 94720-7300 | ||
| Phone | 510-642-5046 (office) | |
| Office | 419 Hearst Memorial Mining Building | |
Education
| UC Berkeley, Ph.D. Physics | DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellow | 2008-Present |
| Swarthmore College, B.A. Physics | High Honors, Phi Beta Kappa | 2004-2008 |
Research
I work with Birgitta Whaley in the Berkeley Quantum Information & Computation Center. My Ph.D. research is on the role of electronic quantum coherence in photosynthetic energy transfer. Here are a few of the overarching questions I aim to answer:
- What can coherence tell us about photosynthesis?
- Does quantum coherence contribute to biological function?
- Is photosynthesis accessible to tools and concepts from quantum information theory?
As an undergraduate, I worked with David Meyer at UC San Diego on quantum algorithms based on discrete time quantum walks.
Publications
- Stephan Hoyer, Akihito Ishizaki and K. Birgitta Whaley, Propagating quantum coherence enables a biomimetic quantum ratchet, arXiv:1106.2911
- Stephan Hoyer, Mohan Sarovar and K. Birgitta Whaley. Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthetic light harvesting, New J. Phys. 12, 065041 (2010), arXiv:0910.1847
- Stephan Hoyer and David A. Meyer, Faster transport with a directed quantum walk. Phys. Rev. A 79, 024307 (2009), arXiv:0901.1007. Selected for publication in the Virtual Journal of Quantum Information. Mathematica source for Fig. 2.
Talks
- Limits of quantum speedup in photosynthesis. APS March Meeting 2010, Portland, Oregon, USA (March 2010).
- Quantum random walks in energy landscapes. Workshop on Quantum Effects in Biological Systems (QuEBS 2009), Lisbon, Portugal (July 2009).
Chromophores and their electronic coupling strengths in the FMO complex of green sulfur bacteria.
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Anderson localization in a 1D continuous time quantum walk.
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Writing from Swarthmore
At Swarthmore College, I majored in physics and minored in mathematics. Here are my final projects for each department:
- Undergraduate thesis: Quantum random walk search on satisfiability problems
- Math senior conference paper: Classification of completely positive maps