Description:

Decoherence in the NISQ-era: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde

Almost 100 years ago extraordinary scientists, such as Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg, led the first quantum revolution unraveling the fundamental nature of physical reality. We now find ourselves in the exciting era of a second quantum revolution, heralded by the rapidly growing field of quantum information processing. The biggest challenge of the current NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era is "decoherence", or the loss and erasure of quantum information due to strong interactions between quantum bits and the uncontrolled degrees of freedom around them. This issue seems even more forbidding in view of the requirement of having quantum information platforms that can be scaled up in size and be controllable by external agents – the two functionalities essential to realize a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this talk, I will discuss our progress towards meeting the challenges of quantum information processing, as well as exploring novel non-equilibrium physics, with noisy quantum systems.

Archana Kamal, Associate Professor, Northwestern University

Host: Anupam Garg