The National Centre for Mathematics and Physics (NCMP) at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Saudi Arabia

2010, Volume 5, Number 2

The National Centre for Mathematics and Physics (NCMP) at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Saudi Arabia is designed to facilitate and support development of research in Mathematics and Physics. The mission of the NCMP is to promote excellence of research in physics and mathematics through conducting basic and applied research and providing services, supporting research collaboration, building research infrastructure, including training in mathematics and physics and promoting public understanding of the role of mathematics and physics in modern technology.

The research is focused on competitive projects that are of national and international importance, which could be applied in various fields such as industry, telecommunications and energy. There are six distinguished research groups in the centre:

The research in the area of high energy physics and cosmology is primarily concerned with the fundamental processes at the elementary particle level. The field of condensed matter deals with the synthesis and characterization of atomic and molecular clustering systems. Physical characterization of condensed matter involves the determination of its structural, electronic and electrical, mechanical, magnetic, thermal, and optical properties. Medical physics research is concentrated on applications of physics principles in medicine. It is an interdisciplinary field that mainly deals with medical imaging for diagnostic purposes and radiotherapy. It uses physics tools to help better diagnose diseases at the early stages, and to offer patients proper treatment. The accelerator physics group focuses its research on application and implementation of accelerators, and the NCMP research has recently been able to design and construct accelerator tubes for electrostatic accelerators. A central activity in the area of applied mathematics is to develop mathematical tools and models for understanding natural and human systems. Applied mathematics translates the physical world into algorithms and mathematical procedures that

allow computers to attack bigger and more complex problems and to solve these problems faster than humans can alone. The algorithms developed in applied mathematics power high-fidelity simulation and analysis of physical, chemical and biological processes, describing them in discrete terms that computers can calculate.

The newly established Quantum Optics and Quantum Information group is committed to research on quantum entanglement, its creation, controlled processing and applications. An additional issue that is intensively studied is the understanding of how entanglement is transferred between systems and the prediction of associated conservation rules of the transfer process. The current activities also involve studies on atomic mirrors, the applications of photonic band gap systems in information processing, optical tweezers, quantum storage of information in atomic systems and optical lattices, and quantum optical switches. The research conducted is based on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and is directed towards potential applications in nanotechnology, cryptography, quantum computing, quantum communication and high-precision spectroscopy. The members of the group are the internationally renowned experts in the field of quantum information and have well established collaborations with leading quantum optics laboratories including Stevens Institute of Technology, Institute for Quantum Studies at the Texas A&M University, Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg, MIMOS in Malaysia and Huazhong Normal University, China.