Current undergraduate students

Wednesday, August 7, 2024 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

IQC Student Seminar Featuring Zachary Mann

Noisy Quantum Metrology and Quantum Error Correction

QNC building, 200 University Ave. Room 1201, Waterloo 

In this talk I will present the basics of quantum metrology and quantum sensing in noisy environments. I will go over important results of the field that show quantum error correction can be used to obtain optimal sensing protocols when certain conditions on the noise are met.  I will then briefly discuss my current research in generalizing these results to the non-Markovian case.

Friday, August 2, 2024 10:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

USEQIP Tutorial: QI with Harmonic Oscillators

Mohammad Ayyash, IQC, Researcher

QNC building, 200 University Ave. Room 1201, Waterloo 

An overview of quantum harmonic oscillators is given. The phase space picture of quantum mechanics is discussed with a special focus on Wigner functions. An overview of Gaussian states and channels is discussed. Non-classical states and their phase-space signatures are explored. Some examples of non-classical states used for encoding logical quantum information and their properties are explored. If the time permits, current research directions and popular implementation platforms will be discussed.

Wednesday, July 31, 2024 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

IQC Student Seminar Featuring Itammar Steinberg, Weizmann Institute of Science

Entanglement distillation and DIQKD

QNC building, 200 University Ave. Room 1201, Waterloo 

Quantum entanglement can be quantified in many ways, some of which bear clear operational meanings. The Distillable Entanglement and DIQKD rate are two such measures, speculated to be equivalent as stated by the Revised Peres Conjecture (Friedman and Leditzky, 21). Our research lays foundations to the conjecture’s proof, most notably using the notion of ‘private states’, a family of quantum states that arise naturally in the context of QKD.  Asking questions such as “what kind of private state can be resulted from a certain DIQKD protocol?”, we were able to provide simple sufficient conditions for the Revised Peres Conjecture to hold.

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

IQC Student Seminar Featuring Emiliia Dyrenkova

Fermion-to-qubit mappings and their error mitigating properties

QNC building, 200 University Ave. Room 1201, Waterloo 

 As we move towards the era of quantum computers with 1000+ qubits, the most promising application able to harness the potential of such devices is quantum simulation. Simulating fermionic systems is both a well-formulated problem with clear real-world applications and a computationally challenging task. In order to simulate a system of fermions on a quantum computer, one has to map the fermionic Hamiltonian to a qubit Hamiltonian. The most popular such mapping is the Jordan-Wigner encoding, which suffers from inefficiencies caused by the non-locality of the encoded operators. As a result, alternative local mappings have been proposed that solve the problem of long encoded operators at the expense of constant factor of qubits. Some of these alternative mappings end up possessing non-trivial stabilizer structure akin to popular quantum error correction (QEC) codes. 

In this talk, I will introduce the problem of mapping fermionic operators to qubit operators and how the selection of an encoding could affect resource requirements in near-term simulations. I will also talk about error mitigation approaches utilizing the stabilizer structure of certain encodings as well as using stabilizer simulation to assess the effectiveness of such approaches.

Friday, July 19, 2024 10:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Introduction to Quantum Chemistry with PennyLane

Daniel Nino, Xanadu

QNC building, 200 University Ave. Room 1201, Waterloo 

Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies and also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.

Through this workshop, attendees will be given a broad overview of some applications of quantum computing to quantum chemistry. Through a series of hands-on exercises, attendees will learn about some PennyLane functionalities for workflows in quantum chemistry. By the end of the session, they will have hands-on experience in building quantum programs with PennyLane and how to use PennyLane datasets in applications to reduce time to research.

Please bring a laptop with you for this session. The workshop will run over Google Colab, no specific installation is required.