Events

Keysight's Quantum Engineering Toolkit: A commercial, customizable integrated control and test system

Presented by guest speaker Nizar Messaoudi, Keysight Technologies Application Engineer

With traditional classical complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) computing struggling to keep up with Moore’s law, interest in quantum computing has exploded and the University of Waterloo is at the centre of this technological revolution.

PhD Seminar

Chunhao Wang, PhD candidate

David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

We present a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of Hamiltonians that are not necessarily sparse. Our algorithm is based on the assumption that the entries of the Hamiltonian are stored in a data structure that allows for the efficient preparation of states that encode the rows of the Hamiltonian. We use a linear combination of quantum walks to achieve a poly-logarithmic dependence on the precision. 

David P. Pappas, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

A brief history and overview of the requirements to guide the research and development for high-coherence superconducting quantum circuits will be given. The main focus will be on materials development at NIST. Topics will include identifying and mitigating loss due to amorphous two-level systems at interfaces and how to scale the fabrication of small aluminum-oxide tunnel junctions. The junctions were studied with atom probe microscopy to get an understanding of where the oxidation occurs.

Yaoyun Shi, Director, Alibaba Quantum Laboratory (AQL)

I will take this opportunity to share with the Waterloo quantum community the thinkings behind Alibaba Group's quantum computing program and our main activities. Questions and comments from the audience are welcome.

About the speaker: Yaoyun Shi is a computer scientist trained at Beijing University, Princeton, and Caltech. He taught at University of Michigan before moving to Alibaba to launch its quantum computing program.

Nana Liu, Centre for Quantum Technologies

We present a verifiable and blind protocol for assisted universal quantum computing on continuous-variable (CV) platforms. This protocol is highly experimentally-friendly to the client, as it only requires Gaussianoperation capabilities from the latter. Moreover, the server is not required universal quantum-computational power either, its only function being to supply the client with copies of a single-mode non-Gaussian state. Universality is attained based on state-injection of the serverʼs non-Gaussian supplies.

Daniel Kyungdeock Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Machine learning is an interesting family of problems for which near-term quantum devices can provide considerable advantages. In particular, exponential quantum speedup is recently demonstrated in learning a Boolean function that calculates the parity of a randomly chosen input bit string and a hidden bit string in the presence of noise, the problem known as learning parity with noise (LPN).

IQC and the Department of Physics at the University of Waterloo welcome Shahpoor Moradi, University of Calgary

Quantum computation has been developed as a computationally efficient paradigm to solve problems that are intractable with conventional classical computers. Quantum computers have the potential to support the simulation and modeling of many complex physical systems, not just quantum ones, significantly more rapidly than conventional supercomputers.

Shun Yanai, Delft University of Technology

Microwave optomechanical circuits have been demonstrated in the past years to be powerful tools for both, exploring fundamental physics of macroscopic and massive quantum objects as well as being promising candidates for novel on-chip quantum limited microwave devices. In this work, we explore a microwave optomechanical device consisting of a coplanar microwave cavity coupled to a mechanical high quality factor nanobeam resonator.

Joel Wallman, University of Waterloo

Significant global efforts are currently underway to build quantum computers. The two main goals for near-term quantum computers are finding and solving interesting problems in the presence of noise and developing techniques to mitigate errors. In this talk, I will outline and motivate an abstraction layer needed to reliably operate quantum computers under realistic noise models, namely, a cycle consisting of all the primitive gates applied to a quantum computer within a specified time period.

From Laser Cooling to Quantum Chemistry

Lasers are used in factories for burning through metal and in movies for blowing up space ships. But in the lab, we use them to cool atoms down to within one billionth of a degree of absolute zero.