Quantum communication is the art of transferring quantum states from one place to another. The most fascinating example is Quantum Teleportation: an object dissolves here and reappears there without ever existing at any intermediate location. In the first half of this presentation we present the experimental challenges that had to be overcome in order to demonstrate teleportation from our lab to a Swisscom center downtown Geneva. In the second half we discuss some conceptual issues of quantum nonlocality. We consider it both from the point of view of the resources required to simulate it and as a resource enabling one to achieve tasks otherwise impossible

We formulate the Josephson effect in a field theoretic language whichaffords a straightforward generalization to the non-abelian case. Ourformalism interprets Josephson tunneling as the excitation of pseudo-Goldstone bosons. We demonstrate the formalism through theconsideration of a single junction separating two regions with apurely non-abelian order parameter and a sandwich of three regionswhere the central region is in a distinct phase. Applications tovarious non-abelian symmetry breaking systems in particle andcondensed matter physics are given.

Gas phase nanoparticle production, manipulation and deposition is of primary importance for the synthesis of novel nanostructured systems and for the development of industrial processes based on the convergence of micro- and nanofabrication. I will present and discuss an approach, based on supersonic cluster beam, introducing cluster sources, nanoparticle particle formation and growth mechanisms and the use of aerodynamic focusing methods that are coupled with supersonic expansions to obtain high intensity cluster beams with a control on nanoparticle mass and spatial distribution. The relevance of this approach for fundamental research and applications will be highlighted

In recent years, it has been shown that magnetic properties ofultrathin magnetic multilayers depend strongly on the surface andinterface structure, chemical composition, crystallinity, and grain sizesand their distributions. In general, all these structural properties canbe tuned by ion irradiation. In addition, it has been shown that themagnetic properties can also be tuned by ion irradiation. In this seminar,I shall talk on tuning the magnetic properties of ultrathin magneticmultilayers by ion irradiation