Meet Us During IEEE QCE 2021
The IEEE Quantum Week 2021 is just around the corner, and we have prepared an outstanding program for it! A quantum superstar-filled panel on the future of quantum computing, as well as an extensive workshop that will teach you how to use a single platform to control 5 different types of qubits. So, be sure to add these to your schedule and keep reading for more info. 😉
Panel: Aiming for the Future: Quantum Computing in 2050
Date: Monday, Oct 18, 2021
Time: 10:45-12:15 Mountain Time (MDT) — UTC-6
John Martinis: UC Santa Barbara, USA
Scott Aaronson: University of Texas at Austin, USA
Rainer Blatt: University of Innsbruck, Austria
Alexander Keesling: QuERA Computing, USA
Itamar Sivan: CEO, Quantum Machines
Elsie Loukiantchenko: Quantum Machines
In 2021, as we are paving the way towards scalable quantum computing, our focus is on solving problems that serve as the most immediate roadblocks. Significantly improving gate fidelity, fabricating increasingly complex QPUs, and building tools for error correction. In the NISQ era of today, our bottlenecks are quite fundamental. With this panel, however, we are aiming at the future with an attempt to envision what the quantum computers of 2050 will look like.
We give panelists free rein to think long-term and remove the 3 main roadblocks facing their research today, across various qubit platforms. Instead, we will focus on answering the following questions: What is the next set of big challenges for the quantum research community, and how should this affect the work being done today? What will the ideal future quantum computer look like? What hardware will it contain, and which problems will become the new roadblocks? What kind of architecture will be expected, and what would the role of quantum control be at that point?
First, we will introduce the various types of quantum computers being brought forward. Next, we will examine different layers which make up the computer to create a common framework for the discussion: architecture, hardware, and software, to name a few. We expect to have an interesting and engaging conversation about the future of quantum computing and discuss how the quantum community can help propel these ideas forwards.
Workshop: Standardized Quantum Control with the QOP: A Single Control System for All Qubit Platforms
Date: Tuesday, Oct 19, 2021
Time: 10:45-16:45 Mountain Time (MDT) — UTC-6
How do you control five different processors based on five qubit technologies from a single universal control system with a single and standard interface? In this workshop, we introduce the Quantum Orchestration Platform (QOP), which allows exactly this, and discuss the advantages of such a standardized control system. We will discuss the underlying technology, the Pulse Processor, a new type of classical processor with a unique architecture that allows unprecedented flexibility in the applications that can run on a quantum control system.
We will run live demos written in our platform-agnostic high-level language: QUA. These demos will show the quantum control abilities of the QOP on each of the following five qubit platforms: superconducting, quantum dots, trapped ions, neutral atoms, and NV/defect centers. We run applications starting at basic qubit characterization experiments and ending at complex multi-qubit control, including quantum error correction and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms.
The QUA language, the demonstration protocols, and many additional tools and experiments are about to be open-sourced. In particular, the QUA libraries, the open-source repositories, are built with the goal of becoming a fully-featured resource, providing pre-built components to accelerate the development of quantum protocols. These include neural networks for state estimation, optimal control using black-box optimization techniques, Bayesian estimation procedures, and much more. Tools in the QUA libraries are designed to make deployment to any qubit platform seamless, thus providing a standard shared experience for the quantum community. It’s like Eurovision, but for quantum physics.
SESSION #1: The need, requirements, and implementation of universal quantum control
Time: 10:45AM – 12:15PM MDT
In this introductory session, we first discuss the need for a highly flexible and universal control platform that allows the deployment of control schemes for different types of QPUs and architectures. We will describe the goal of such a system and the requirements of standardized quantum control. As implementation examples, we will first show how the Quantum Orchestration Platform (QOP), is used to control a new emerging platform: all-MW trapped ions. We will then discuss how the control protocols for various qubit platforms (such as superconducting qubits) can be built from a common code template to tackle the same conceptual application while maintaining the freedom to optimize for the individual QPU technology.
SESSION #2: Paving the way towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with the Quantum Orchestration Platform
Time: 1:00PM – 2:30PM MDT
Part 1: NISQ protocols
The NISQ era is the stage of quantum computing where one intends to assess the ability of today’s imperfect quantum hardware to solve problems considered as computationally hard when addressing them with classical resources.
Among the candidates that would showcase potential advantage over classical computing, Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) do find a large interest in the research community, for they share in common the idea to exploit quantum information processing as a tool for computing difficult functions in the frame of wider classical algorithms. We will show that the QOP does indeed constitute a good candidate for connecting classical and quantum resources in a very suitable way for the realization of VQAs. Moreover, we will specify how pulse control could further extend the possibilities offered by NISQ hardware through a combination of Quantum Optimal Control (QOC) theory and VQAs.
Part 2: Quantum Error Correction
In this session, we will discuss several fundamental aspects of quantum error correction and the control challenges they raise: firstly, state preservation via parity tracking measurements, and secondly a focus on a single syndrome measurement cycle in a surface code architecture based on bosonic cat codes. In both cases, we explain the basic principles behind the protocols and then focus on how the flexible and ultra-low latency feedback control provides a unique advantage that is essential to their successful realization. In both cases, we show how these protocols are implemented in QUA, QM’s pulse language description, in a clean and simple manner. Specifically, in the case of parity tracking, we show an implementation with two different qubit platforms, cat qubits, and transmons, and demonstrate how both of them can be conveniently realized with the QOP.
SESSION #3: Showcasing feedback and real-time classical processing in different QPUs
Time: 3:15PM – 4:45PM MDT
After showing how real-time feedback and classical processing play a key role in quantum algorithms, in the previous session. In this session, we will show how these components are also crucial in the preparation and calibration stages of quantum systems. The case of controlling silicon-based quantum-dot qubits and taking advantage of feedback capabilities will be presented first. This will be followed by a demonstration of how the QOP can be used to move atoms in tweezer traps and arrange the initial arrays for Rydberg QPUs. We will also show how the low latency feedback architecture of the QOP can allow for the generation of gates that are immune to laser intensity fluctuations.
- Part 1: On-demand electrical control of spin qubits (Will Gilbert, UNSW).
- Part 2: Preparing arrays and optimizing gates in Rydberg platforms
- Arranging an atom array with the QOP
- Adaptive gates: mitigating laser intensity noise with feed-forward locks
Looking forward to seeing you all at the conference!
