Applied Physics Seminar
Prof. Nathan Wiebe, University of Toronto
Date : Wednesday, 1/25/23
Time: 1:00 PM
Location: YQI Seminar Room or via Zoom
Zoom Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/92547936094
Meeting ID: 925 4793 6094
Unifying Quantum Algorithms
Quantum computing has made great strides within the last few years with experimental demonstrations of quantum computers within 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.