Seminar

Quantum information science offers a remarkable promise: by thinking practically about how quantum systems can be put to work to solve computational and information processing tasks, we gain novel insights into the foundations of quantum theory and computer science. Or, conversely, by (re)considering the fundamental physical building blocks of computers and sensors, we enable new technologies, with major impacts for computational and experimental physics.

Quantum computing hardware capabilities have grown tremendously over the past decade, as evidenced by demonstrations of both quantum advantage and error-corrected logical qubits.  These breakthroughs have been driven, in part, by advances in quantum characterization, verification, and validation (QCVV).  I will discuss how QCVV provides a hardware-agnostic framework for assessing the performance of quantum computers; I will describe in detail how specific QCVV protocols (such as gate set tomography and robust phase estimation) have been used to characterize and si

The goal of this talk is to give an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of having geometric locality in quantum error-correcting codes. Starting with an introduction to the surface code, I will highlight the nice features of a geometrically local 2D stabilizer code. However, we will also examine the limitations that arise from imposing geometric locality, and how these limitations come about, particularly with regard to the code parameters and the allowable set of logical gates.

Quantum computers are likely to have a significant impact on cryptography. Many commonly used cryptosystems will be completely broken once large quantum computers are available. Since quantum computers can solve the factoring problem in polynomial time, the security of RSA would not hold against quantum computers. For symmetric-key cryptosystems, the primary quantum attack is key recovery via Grover search, which provides a quadratic speedup. One way to address this is to double the key length.

The standard approach to universal fault-tolerant quantum computing is to develop a general-purpose quantum error correction mechanism that can implement a universal set of logical gates fault-tolerantly. Given such a scheme, any quantum algorithm can be realized fault-tolerantly by composing the relevant logical gates from this set. However, we know that quantum computers provide a significant quantum advantage only for specific quantum algorithms.

How can we reliably test whether a quantum computer has achieved an advantage over existing classical computers?  A promising approach is to base these tests ("proofs of quantumness") on cryptographic hardness assumptions.  Such assumptions are the foundation for encryption and authentication protocols, and as such they are well-studied.  Brakerski et al.

Topological band structures are well known to produce symmetry-protected chiral edge states which transport particles unidirectionally. These same effects can be harnessed in the frequency domain using a spin-1/2 system subject to periodic drives.

A variety of quantum algorithms employ Pauli operators as a convenient basis for studying the spectrum or evolution of Hamiltonians or measuring multibody observables. One strategy to reduce circuit depth in such algorithms involves simultaneous diagonalization of Pauli operators generating unitary evolution operators or observables of interest.

The concept of antidistinguishability of quantum states has been studied to investigate foundational questions in quantum mechanics. It is also called quantum state elimination, because the goal of such a protocol is to guess which state, among finitely many chosen at random, the system is not prepared in (that is, it can be thought of as the first step in a process of elimination). Antidistinguishability has been used to investigate the reality of quantum states, ruling out psi-epistemic ontological models of quantum mechanics [Pusey et al., Nat.

After two decades of development, superconducting circuits have emerged as a rich platform for quantum computation and simulation. When combined with superconducting qubits, lattices of coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators can be used to realize artificial photonic materials or photon-mediated spin models. Here I will highlight the special properties of this hardware implementation that lead to these lattices naturally being described as line graphs.