Official description

This is a course intended for any students in Physics or Computer science who work in Quantum Computation, Quantum Information, Quantum Optics, AMO, Quantum Control, who are interested in how quantum computers can be used to simulate other physical systems, from condensed matter to quantum chemistry to high energy physics.

This course assumes a level of knowledge of quantum mechanics of a first year physics graduate student or of students from other disciplines who have taken an introductory quantum computing course. New formalism will be introduced as needed to make the course as broadly accessible as possible.

Quantum computation is advancing rapidly, with new hardware, fault-tolerant qubits and novel algorithms appearing each year. This course focusses on the original motivation for building a quantum computer, as expressed by Feynman in a lecture in 1981 (Richard P. Feynman, Simulating Physics with Computers, International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, 467–488 (1982).), which is that quantum mechanical systems are extremely difficult to describe using classical computers. This observation has grown into the subfield of quantum simulation - using programmable quantum hardware to learn new things about quantum systems that are too difficult to simulate classically.

The class will cover digital quantum simulation algorithms including state preparation, simulation of time evolution and phase estimation. These are the principal building blocks of all quantum simulation algorithms. Simulation of time evolution will cover Hamiltonian simulation algorithms from early works to the research frontier. We will learn how these building blocks can be used to address both static (eigenvalue) and dynamic (scattering) problems. We will discuss the contest between classical and quantum algorithms and the prospects for achieving quantum advantage in quantum simulation.