News
Photon Detector Module gearing up for International Space Station
A single-photon detector and counting module (SPODECT) recently built by Waterloo’s Quantum Photonics Lab for the International Space Station (ISS) will be used to verify quantum entanglement and test its survivability in space as part of the Space Entanglement and Annealing QUantum Experiment (SEAQUE) mission, in a collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ADVR Inc, and the National University of Singapore
EvolutionQ receives $7 million in funding
EvolutionQ, founded by Norbert Lütkenhaus, Executive Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, and IQC faculty member Michele Mosca, has secured $7 million in funding for quantum-safe cybersecurity. EvolutionQ is looking to help organizations prepare themselves for quantum computers. Their Series A financing is led by Quantonation, a Paris-based, quantum technology-focused VC fund, with support from Toronto’s The Group Ventures, to “scale up” its quantum-safe cybersecurity tech.
IQC student recognized with W.B. Pearson Medal for creative research
Jie Lin, PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), earned the W.B. Pearson Medal for his PhD thesis Security Analysis of Quantum Key Distribution: Methods and Applications.
Events
Coherent Parallelization of Universal Classical Computation
Previously, higher-order Hamiltonians (HoH) had been shown to offer an advantage in both metrology and quantum energy storage. In this work, we axiomatize a model of computation that allows us to consider such Hamiltonians for the purposes of computation. From this axiomatic model, we formally prove that an HoH-based algorithm can gain up to a quadratic speed-up (in the size of the input) over classical sequential algorithms—for any possible classical computation. We show how our axiomatic model is grounded in the same physics as that used in HoH-based quantum advantage for metrology and battery charging. Thus we argue that any advance in implementing HoH-based quantum advantage in those scenarios can be co-opted for the purpose of speeding up computation.
QNC 1201
IQC Student Seminar featuring Sarah Li
Improved Synthesis of Restricted Clifford+T Circuits
In quantum information theory, the decomposition of unitary operators into gates from some fixed universal set is of great research interest. Since 2013, researchers have discovered a correspondence between certain quantum circuits and matrices over rings of algebraic integers. For example, there is a correspondence between a family of restricted Clifford+T circuits and the group On(Z[1/2]). Therefore, in order to study quantum circuits, we can study the corresponding matrix groups and try to solve the constructive membership problem (CMP): given a set of generators and an element of the group, how to factor this element as a product of generators? Since a good solution to CMP yields a smaller decomposition of an arbitrary group element, it helps us implement quantum circuits using fewer resources.
IQC Student Seminar featuring Shayan Majidy
Noncommuting charges: Bridging theory to experiment
Noncommuting conserved quantities have recently launched a subfield of quantum thermodynamics. In conventional thermodynamics, a system of interest and an environment exchange quantities—energy, particles, electric charge, etc.—that are globally conserved and are represented by Hermitian operators. These operators were implicitly assumed to commute with each other, until a few years ago. Freeing the operators to fail to commute has enabled many theoretical discoveries—about reference frames, entropy production, resource-theory models, etc. Little work has bridged these results from abstract theory to experimental reality. This work provides a methodology for building this bridge systematically: we present a prescription for constructing Hamiltonians that conserve noncommuting quantities globally while transporting the quantities locally. The Hamiltonians can couple arbitrarily many subsystems together and can be integrable or nonintegrable. Our Hamiltonians may be realized physically with superconducting qudits, with ultracold atoms, and with trapped ions.
