Continuous-time quantum computing and simulation: perspectives and challenges

Dr Ulrich Schneider is an experimental physicist studying quantum simulation and many-body physics using ultracold atoms in optical lattices. He is a reader in many-body physics at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. Earlier positions include the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich and the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz. He has worked extensively on the non-equilibrium dynamics in optical lattices and the realisation of many-body localisation. Other works include studies of quantum transport, the dynamics of a quantum phase transition, fermionic Mott insulators, and Negative Absolute Temperatures. He also developed interferometric probes for topology and quasicrystalline potentials for ultracold atoms. He is the winner of the 2015 Rudolf-Kaiser prize and holds an ERC starting grant. He has acted as guest editor for Annalen der Physik and as organiser of several international conferences, including a Royal Society Discussion Meeting on MBL in 2017.

Charles Adams is Professor of Physics at Durham University and the founding Director of the Joint Quantum Centre (JQC) Durham-Newcastle. He comes from Rochdale and did an undergraduate degree in Physics at Hertford College, Oxford. Subsequently, he did a research masters in Canada followed by a PhD at Strathclyde University, where he developed the first single-frequency Ti:sapphire laser which became a successful product. He did post-doctoral work on atom optics at Konstanz and on laser cooling and trapping at Stanford before becoming a lecturer in Durham. In 2014 he was awarded the IOP Thomson medal for pioneering the field of Rydberg quantum optics. He is a co-author of two books, Optics f2f (OUP 2019) and Rydberg Physics (IOPP 2018).

Ben Lanyon was born in 1981 in the UK and received his undergraduate and Masters degrees in Physics from the University of Warwick, UK, in 2003. In 2009, Ben received his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia. For his PhD thesis, Ben contributed to developing and experimentally demonstrating new techniques for the field of quantum information science, using single and entangled photons. This work was done in the group of Professor Andrew White. Ben came to Innsbruck in 2009 to carry out research on quantum information science with trapped atomic ions, in the group of Rainer Blatt. Ben has since been awarded a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship (2010) and an Austrian Start award (2015). Ben is now setting up his own research team at IQOQI: the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information. His work focuses on developing and demonstrating new techniques to interface light and matter at the quantum level, to interface different types of quantum systems and to enable the distribution of entanglement over large distances.

Emily Davis is currently a graduate student in the Schleier-Smith lab at Stanford University. There, she built an experiment that studies nonlocal, photon-mediated interactions between cold rubidium atoms in an optical cavity.

Wolfgang Lechner received his PhD in Vienna under supervision of Professor Christoph Dellago in computational physics. For his postdoc he moved to Amsterdam to work with Professor Peter Bolhuis on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. In 2012 he joined Professor Peter Zoller's group in Innsbruck where he contributed to the fields of quantum simulation and quantum computing. In 2017 he established his own research group at the University of Innsbruck dedicated to the development of quantum algorithms for optimisation and machine learning.

Valentina Parigi obtained her PhD at LENS (European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy) in Florence in 2009. During her PhD she worked on generation, manipulation and characterisation of non-classical states of light and she realised the first experimental test on quantum commutation rules. As a post-doc she has been involved in the experimental realisation of strong non-linear effects mediated by Rydberg atoms at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau and she worked in the atomic quantum memory group at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel (LKB) in Paris. In 2015 she joined the Multimode Quantum Optics team at LKB as Associate Professor. Her interests range from the foundations of quantum mechanics to the experimental implementation of basic tools for quantum information technologies. She is currently involved in the implementation of complex quantum networks in a multi-mode continuous-variables scenario (http://www.lkb.upmc.fr/quantumoptics/quantum-complex-networks/) supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Thierry Lahaye studied Physics at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He then did his PhD at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, under the supervision of Jean Dalibard, working on the evaporative cooling of a magnetically guided atomic beam. In 2006 he joined Tilman Pfau’s group in Stuttgart, Germany, as a post-doctoral researcher, and there he studied dipolar quantum gases of Chromium atoms. He was hired by CNRS as a researcher in 2008, and since 2012 he has been working at Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, in the group led by Antoine Browaeys, on quantum simulation experiments using arrays of individual Rydberg atoms.

Ruth Oulton’s field of research involves the study of nanoscale semiconductor devices that enable the exchange of “quantum” information between a single electron and a single photon.  The idea is that they can use the rules of quantum mechanics to perform computing and measurements in a completely new way.  She take ideas from quantum theory and information science, bring them together with what we are beginning to understand about semiconductors on the nanoscale, and to make working quantum devices that engineers will use as part of their everyday toolkit.  In her recent work she studies single electron spins in atomic-like systems, and studies how the angular momentum of the photon and spin exchange information, and how photonic design can influence this.  In other interdisciplinary side projects she studies the role of photonic structures in plants such as seaweed and begonias.

Paul Warburton is Professor of Nanoelectronics at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. He is interested in both experimental implementations and applications of quantum annealing using superconducting devices. He is involved in designing novel Hamiltonians which reveal the underlying quantumness of small systems of annealed qubits and/or which can be exploited for applications. His group gave the first demonstration of maximum-entropy inference using an experimental quantum annealer, confirming that information can be extracted from the excited states. He is part of the US-government-funded collaboration 'Quantum Enhanced Optimization'.

Sophie Shermer is an Associate Professor of Physics at Swansea University, UK. She previously held positions as a Cambridge-MIT (CMI) Research Fellow and Advanced Research Fellow of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) at the University of Cambridge, as a Marie Curie Visiting Professor at Kuopio University, Finland, as well as positions at the Open University and the University of Oregon. Sophie’s research interests range from nano-science at the quantum edge and quantum engineering, especially the design, modelling and characterisation of quantum devices and new paradigms for optimal and robust control, to medical physics and imaging.

Dieter Jaksch is the Head of Atomic and Laser Physics at the University of Oxford. He has worked on strongly correlated quantum systems and their non-equilibrium dynamics since 1998 starting with a proposal for achieving a superfluid to Mott insulator transition in ultracold gases. It was followed by theoretical work that helped laying the foundations of the research field of strongly correlated ensembles of ultracold atoms in optical lattices and realisations of quantum simulators with neutral atoms. His current research interests include developing quantum algorithms for early generation quantum computers, eg, for solving non-linear partial differential equations and optimisation problems, and extending quantum optical techniques towards controlling quantum materials.

Alejandro did his graduate studies, MA and PhD in Chemical Physics, at Harvard University. Over the past 10+ years, he has worked on the implementation of quantum computing algorithms, enhancing their performance with physics-based approaches while maintaining a practical, application-relevant perspective. Before joining Rigetti as a Senior Research Scientist, Alejandro was the lead scientist of the Quantum Machine Learning effort at NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (NASA QuAIL). He also holds an Honorary Senior Research Associate position at University College London and his latest research involves the design of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms to solve hard optimization problems and intractable machine learning subroutines.

Steve has over a decade of research experience in quantum information, most recently as a Senior Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Steve’s work is at the forefront of software and algorithms for quantum computers and he founded Riverlane to exploit these breakthroughs.