09/17 TH 3:15PM

Abstract

The field of quantum information and quantum computation has made tremendous progress towards maturing from a theoretical curiosity into a physical reality. Today there are real quantum systems being developed in academia and industry that could soon help us solve some practical problems beyond the reach of the best classical supercomputers. But what is fundamentally different in quantum information science compared to conventional “classical” information and computation?

In this talk we will first discuss the big picture of quantum information science and get a sense for its intrinsically interdisciplinary nature. We will briefly understand some of the different research areas in quantum, all of them coupled tightly with mathematics. Then we will review the basics of quantum information and computation, guided by useful examples. In particular, we will learn about Pauli matrices and their utility in conveniently representing all complex square matrices, which has applications even outside of quantum information. We will understand how quantum measurements help make reliable quantum computers possible despite the continuum of noise, unlike the case of classical analog computers. Then we will describe the basic ideas in quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation. Finally, we will discuss some of our own recent work and the challenges in making scalable and reliable quantum computers. The talk will only assume some familiarity with linear algebra and basic probability.

Biography

Narayanan Rengaswamy received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Duke University in May 2020. He continued at Duke as a research associate but is currently a postdoctoral associate with Bane Vasic at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Prior to this, he completed his Master of Science (M.S.) in ECE at Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2015, and his Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Amrita University, Coimbatore, India, in 2013. At Duke, he worked on problems in classical and quantum error correction, and quantum communications, with his supervisors Henry Pfister and Robert Calderbank. He addressed a longstanding question in fault-tolerant quantum computation via a perspective rooted in classical coding theory. This was one of the 73 out of 283 submissions that was accepted as a talk in the esteemed 2020 Quantum Information Processing (QIP) conference. He has also analyzed a recently proposed quantum algorithm for classical communications over an optical channel and shown that it is quantum optimal in minimizing the error probability. This is an exciting result that points towards a communication advantage with near-term special-purpose photonic quantum processors. More information on his work is available on his webpage: https://nrenga.github.io.