Quantum Information seminar: Prineha Narang, UCLA

Accurate and efficient simulation of molecules and materials is one of the most important outstanding problems in science and engineering. The advent of quantum computing and rapid advances in exascale computing raise new possibilities for overcoming the complexity that has stymied simulation of quantum systems on traditional high-performance computers. The promise of quantum matter for quantum information science superimposed with the potential of quantum algorithms to understand phenomena in molecules and materials will be the overarching theme of this talk. Efforts towards developing new quantum algorithmic approaches for quantum simulation and advanced calculation methods for many-body quantum systems stand to enable major advances towards functional quantum materials and their deployment. Here, I will discuss new algorithms and computational approaches to predict and understand the behavior of quantum chemical systems and correlated quantum matter. The strongly interdisciplinary nature of the topics covered necessitates a common language to integrate ideas from these fields. Therefore, I will start with a common language weaving fields including but not limited to electronic structure theory, open quantum systems, algorithm design, and quantum electrodynamics, together. Scaling such quantum computers naturally leads to hybrid quantum systems that have garnered quite a bit of recent interest across quantum computing, networks and sensing. The ability to transduce quantum information between different physical modalities remains one of the key open challenges in quantum information science. Improvements in quantum transduction would unlock the potential for hybrid quantum coherent systems that make optimal use of its components -- for example, solid-state quantum computers combining the fast, high-fidelity gates of superconductors with the long storage time of topologically protected qubits and long-distance connectivity of photons. I will present our recent efforts in scaling such hybrid quantum systems to enable quantum sensors and quantum sensor networks. If time permits, I will discuss how such an entangled quantum sensor network can sense multiple geographically and locally distinct systems with higher precision than the summation of each system probed individually with broad applications across the physical, environmental, and life sciences.