Princeton Quantum Colloquium

Please join us on Monday, January 23rd for our Princeton Quantum Colloquium seminar series.  There will be a light lunch in the Bowen Atrium at noon before the seminar.  

 

Speaker:       Professor Nathan Wiebe (University of Toronto)

Date:              Monday, January 23, 2023

Time:             12:30 pm 

Room:            Bowen Hall Auditorium, Light lunch served at 12:00 pm in Bowen Atrium

Host:              Professor Sarang Gopalakrishnan

 

Title: Unifying Quantum Algorithms

Abstract: Quantum computing has made great strides within the last few years with experimental demonstrations of quantum computers with in excess of one hundred quantum bits, elementary quantum error correction demonstrations and ever more sophisticated simulation experiments.  Caught up in this discussion though is the question of what these quantum computers will be useful for and more importantly why they will be useful.  This point is often articulated by the claim made by many scientists that there are only a handful of quantum tricks that we know of that we can use to leverage a quantum advantage.  The aim of my talk is to provide an intuitive understanding of where the power of quantum computing comes from and to explain several of the core tricks that are used to provide exponential speedups for problems ranging from factoring to simulation.  From there I will discuss recent work by my collaborators and myself that actually aims to further reduce this set by devising a unified framework that allows us to think of many of these tricks as a manifestation of a larger concept called a block encoding and show a new family of techniques that can be used to modify these block encodings to solve computational problems.  These approaches promise not only to give simpler ways of thinking about quantum algorithms, but also provide a new host of tools that can be used to provide quantum advantage for a wide range of problems that far exceeds the initial scope believed to be possible for quantum computers.