Distinguished Lecture Series: “Testing Quantumness in the NISQ Era”

Abstract: We are well into the NISQ era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum Computers. Four years on from Google’s “quantum supremacy” experiment, we have a deeper understanding of the nature of that experiment, the computing power of NISQ and novel techniques for benchmarking such computers and characterizing their error models.

At a foundational level, quantum supremacy provides a test of quantum mechanics in a new regime. I will describe how concepts from cryptography have provided novel and counter-intuitive ways of probing quantum systems, and the prospects they hold for the next generation of quantum computers taking on the quantum supremacy challenge.

Bio: Umesh Vazirani is Strauch Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Quantum Computing Center (BQIC). His research has focussed on the foundations of Quantum Complexity Theory, Quantum Algorithms, Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity and Interactive classical testing of quantum devices. Vazirani is co-winner of the Fulkerson Prize for the ARV graph partitioning algorithm, a member of the NAS, and co-author of two books: An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory (MIT Press) and Algorithms (McGraw-Hill).