Instituto Internacional de Física - Natal - Rio Grande do Norte - Brasil
The tropical city of Natal, a historic gem with over 425 years of heritage and home to some of Brazil’s oldest structures, offers a stunning natural backdrop where the Atlantic Ocean meets golden dunes and lush coastal cliffs and landscapes. It is also home to one of Brazil’s leading physics research institutions, the International Institute of Physics (IIP). Dedicated to advancing physics on a global scale, the IIP serves as a bridge between local researchers and the international scientific community. The synergy between Natal’s unique setting and the IIP’s dynamic academic environment provides an ideal venue for the first Quantum at the Dunes summer school and workshop. This event will bring together experts in Quantum Computing and Quantum Information, with a strong focus on practical challenges at the intersection of both fields.
For the official page of the event check
https://www.iip.ufrn.br/en/events/quantum-at-the-dunes
Quantum computing and quantum information have both become recurrent topics in physics, permeating not only many of its subfields but also branches of chemistry, computer science, mathematics and even biology. On the one hand, quantum information provides us with unique lenses through which classical and quantum information, among other (quantum) resources, can be observed as key elements to decipher the properties and dynamics of systems. On the other hand, quantum computing brings forward the theoretical machinery of quantum information aiming at constructing quantum-information-processing devices capable of exploiting interference, entanglement and other quantum resources to enable fast computation, surpassing the capabilities of (classical) supercomputers. In fact, it is believed that certain problems, including the simulation of the dynamics of many-body and quantum-field-theoretic systems, would only be efficiently possible with the aid of scalable quantum information processors. Nonetheless, many challenges remain both on the theoretical and experimental fronts in both fields, and the vastness of the research landscape has led to suboptimal interconnectivity within and between the quantum computing and quantum information communities, creating unnecessary hindrances to their mutual development. As such, the “Quantum at the Dunes” workshop and summer school should focus on recent developments in quantum information processing platforms, quantum communication, quantum protocols, and quantum resources and their applicability to practical problems.
The school will take place between February 23rd and 27th, 2026, and will include lectures on the topics of Quantum Computation and Algorithms, Quantum Communication and Cryptography, Quantum Machine Learning, and Resource Theories and Quantum Thermodynamics, as well as a poster session. The school fee will cover dailty lunches and coffee breaks. The preliminary list of lecturers include:
Alexssandre de Oliveira Junior (Technical University of Denmark)
Resource theory approach to thermodynamics
Daniel Stilck França (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Semidefinite Programs and Quantum Information: Theory and Algorithms
Fernando Brandão (Caltech/AWS, USA)
TBA
Jadwiga Wilkens (University of Linz, Austria)
Classical Shadows: From Theory to Practice
Josias Old (Forschungszentrum Jülich/RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
TBA
Martin Larocca (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
Representation Theory for Quantum Computing
The workshop will happen between March 2nd and 6th, 2026. and include around 30 plenary and invited speakers. Participants can also apply for contributed talks or to the poster session.
The workshop fee will cover daily lunches, coffee breaks, transportation between the hotel and the venue, the conference dinner, and a day trip to the beautiful Ponta do Pirambu resort (https://pontadopirambu.com.
