This event is a part of the Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST) Colloquium series. There will be a pre-colloquium reception at 2:30 pm at 1310 Walker Hall.

Speaker: Pedram Roushan, Google        

Title: Toward discovering novel physics with a NISQ processor

Abstract: In 2019, it was experimentally demonstrated that a quantum processor could perform certain computational tasks exponentially faster than a classical computer [1]. Going beyond this milestone, we seek to utilize these Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) processors to study computationally intractable physics problems.  The class of problems that seems near to us in this regard are quantum dynamics in interacting spin systems far away from equilibrium. I will provide an overview of our progress by describing several of our recent works. The talk hopefully will provide a sense of what NISQ discoveries to anticipate and a time scale for them. 

[1] Nature 574, 505–510 (2019) 

Bio: Pedram Roushan received his PhD in 2011 from Princeton University, performing the first scanning tunneling microscopy on the surface of topological insulators. After three years of post-doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014 he joined the Google quantum hardware lab aiming on making a quantum computer. With the Google team in 2019, they performed the first computation on a quantum processor beyond the capability of a supercomputer. The current focus of his research is on studying non-equilibrium phenomena with quantum processors.