PhD candidate Sophia Simon receives the 2024 Xanadu Award for an Outstanding Publication
Through generous support from Xanadu, the Xanadu Award for an Outstanding Publication was established in the Department of Physics to acknowledge PhD students who have published a peer-reviewed article in an academic journal on a topic related to quantum information and quantum optics. We are delighted to announce this year's recipient – Sophia Simon – who received the award in recognition of her paper "Improved Precision Scaling for Simulating Coupled Quantum-Classical Dynamics", which was published in PRX Quantum in 2024.
This award is the result of a donation from Xanadu, a Toronto-based start-up company with close ties to the Department of Physics. A number of former post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and undergraduate students are affiliated with Xanadu.
Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook says “we wanted to encourage students in the field of quantum information and quantum optics and to let them know that Xanadu, and many other quantum startups in Canada, exist when they graduate.”
Sophia Simon shared her thoughts on her award-winning research:
What inspired you to pursue research in this field?
The inspiration to pursue research in quantum computing derives largely from the potential of quantum computers to vastly outperform classical computers for certain tasks. Understanding how much of a quantum speedup is possible for a given problem is one of the key motivators for my research.
How does your research impact the society we live in today?
My research focuses on developing and analyzing quantum algorithms for fault-tolerant quantum computers.
While these algorithms will likely not be implemented in the near future, they provide a strong motivation for continuing the efforts to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer as they promise significant speedups over classical algorithms for problems such as simulating physical systems.
What impacts do you hope to make through your achievement?
High-precision simulations of coupled quantum-classical dynamics are of great interest in physics, chemistry, biology and pharmacology. For example, molecular dynamics is often formulated in this way wherein the nuclei are treated as classical particles while the electrons are treated quantum-mechanically. This allows numerical investigations of chemical reactions, protein-folding and many other physical processes. However, existing algorithms suffer from unfavorable scaling with precision, making high-precision simulations infeasible for most systems of interest. In this work, we present a novel quantum algorithm that provides a super-polynomial improvement in the precision scaling for simulating coupled quantum-classical dynamics, thus enabling high-precision molecular dynamics simulations. Given the significant speedup of our algorithm and the importance of molecular dynamics simulations across the natural sciences, I hope that this work will inspire further research on simulating quantum-classical systems on quantum computers.
Read the award-winning paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.010343
More on Xanadu:
https://www.xanadu.ai/