NBIA Colloquium: Prineha Narang (UCLA)

Title: Scaling Hybrid Quantum Systems: The road from hardware and algorithms to impact

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”— Frédéric Chopin

Abstract: 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. 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-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 sciences.

Brief bio-sketch: Prineha Narang is Professor and Howard Reiss Chair in Physical Sciences, and in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her PhD from Caltech and became Fellow at Harvard University and research scholar in condensed matter theory at the Physics Department of MIT. She was Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at Harvard University prior to taking up her current position as Professor at UCLA. Her group, the NarangLab, works across areas of quantum photonics, non-equilibrium phenomena, and quantum information science. Professor Narang is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Her work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Physics, a Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the APS, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Award from the Max Planck Society, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics all in 2021, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, being named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35). Her continued leadership in science and technology includes delivering several named lectures and keynote speeches. Outside of science, she is an avid runner and mountaineer.

Refreshments in the NBIA Lounge after the talk!