RQS Seminar

The central philosophy of statistical mechanics and random-matrix theory of complex systems is that while individual instances are essentially intractable to simulate, the statistical properties of random ensembles obey simple universal “laws”. This same philosophy promises powerful methods for studying the dynamics of quantum information in ideal and noisy quantum circuits – for which classical description of individual circuits is expected to be generically intractable.

Near-term quantum information processors will not be capable of quantum error correction, but instead will implement algorithms using the physical native interactions of the device. These interactions can be used to implement quantum gates that are often continuously-parameterized (e.g., by rotation angles), as well as to implement analog quantum simulations that seek to explore the dynamics of a particular Hamiltonian of interest.

Real-time control software and hardware is essential for operating modern quantum systems. In particular, the software plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between applications and real-time operations on the quantum system. Unfortunately, real-time control software is an often underexposed area, and many well-known software engineering techniques have not propagated to this field. As a result, control software is often hardware-specific at the cost of flexibility and portability.

Analog quantum simulators have the potential to provide new insight towards naturally occurring phenomena beyond the capabilities of classical computers in the near term. Incorporating controllable dissipation as a resource enables simulation of a wider range of out-of-equilibrium processes such as chemical reactions. In this talk, I will describe an experiment where we operate a hybrid qubit-oscillator circuit quantum electrodynamics processor and use it to model nonadiabatic molecular reaction dynamics through a so-called conical intersection.