Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Over the past two decades researchers have realized that the unique features of the laws of physics that govern the micro-world, namely the laws of quantum physics, can be harnessed to enable transformative new capabilities for computing, communicating and sensing. This emerging field is known as quantum information science. Recently there have been dramatic advances in experimental capabilities and theoretical methods leading to small scale demonstrations of quantum computing, with up to 16 quantum bits, called qubits. Quantum computing is very powerful: with a little more than 50 qubits, a quantum computer can perform computational tasks that no conventional computer, even today's fastest supercomputers, could perform. But quantum computing is also fragile. The output of a quantum computation can be spoiled due to very small imperfections in the underlying hardware or control, which create new kinds of errors, known as decoherence, which does not occur in conventional computers. Harnessing the capabilities of the quantum world for quantum computing this requires developing new theoretical and experimental tools to overcome these special kinds of errors. Over the past decade my research program pioneered the development of a theoretical framework and practical methods that enable the characterization and suppression of various types of errors in prototype quantum computers. The randomized benchmarking method developed through my research program has recently adopted as the global standard for error characterization and have been applied by all of the leading quantum computing research groups. As prototype quantum computers are now scaling up to dozens of qubits, and quantum computing approaches technological reality, the challenge and importance of characterizing their performance has substantially increased. My research will focus on developing new methods to characterize the performance of integrated quantum computing circuits and to suppress a particularly problematic type of error, known as a coherent error, which can be a limiting factor for achieving robust quantum computing.In addition, there is a strong need for developing tools and concepts that will enable both the research community and industry to understand how to harness the power of quantum computing for a wide variety of societally important problems, such as simulation of materials in quantum chemistry for the pharmaceutical industry and analyzing big data through new forms of machine learning. Thus my research project will aim to facilitate this process by leveraging a recent major result from my research program, where we showed that a very old curiosity about quantum mechanics, associated with peculiar behaviours that arise when attempting to describe quantum systems with classical variables, seems to be the key feature of quantum systems that enables new advances through quantum computing.