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.

Monika Schleier-Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at Stanford University. Her research explores many-body quantum control, quantum metrology, and quantum simulation in model systems of laser-cooled atoms. Schleier-Smith received her BA in Chemistry and Physics, with a secondary concentration in Mathematics, from Harvard University in 2005. She pursued graduate studies in experimental physics at MIT, where her thesis work included enhancing the stability of an atomic clock by entanglement. After receiving her PhD in 2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and LMU Munich. Schleier-Smith’s honours and awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, and National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

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.

Antoine Browaeys studied at the University of Paris-Sud, France. He did his PhD in 2000 at the Institut d’Optique on the cooling and magnetic trapping of a gas of metastable helium, which led to the first Bose-esintein condensation of this element. He spent 2 years at NIST in the Laser Cooling group working on Bose-Einstein and was hired as a scientist at CNRS in 2003. Since 2010 he has led his own activity at the Institut d’Optique. He is working on experiments manipulating individual ultra-cold atoms and small and dense cold atomic clouds. By controlling the dipole-dipole interactions between the atoms in these small systems, he explores many-body physics such as quantum magnetism or the scattering of near resonant light.

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.

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.