Quantum BC Seminar Series – Nadish de Silva

Title:

Efficiently achieving fault-tolerant quantum computation via teleportation

Abstract:

Quantum computers operate by manipulating quantum systems that are particularly susceptible to noise.  Classical redundancy-based error correction schemes cannot be applied as quantum data cannot be copied.  These challenges can be overcome by using a variation of  the ‘quantum teleportation’ protocol to implement those operations which cannot be easily done fault-tolerantly.

This process consumes expensive resources called ‘magic states’.  The vast quantity of these resources states required for achieving fault-tolerance is a significant bottleneck for experimental implementations of universal quantum computers.

I will discuss a program of finding and classifying those quantum operations which can be performed with efficient use of magic state resources.  I will focus on the understanding of not just qubits but also the higher-dimensional ‘qudit’ case.  This is motivated by both practical reasons and for the resulting theoretical insights into the ultimate origin of quantum computational advantages.  Research into these quantum operations has remained active from their discovery twenty-five years ago to the present.

The results in this talk will include joint work with Chen, Lautsch, and Bampounis-Barbosa.

Bio:

Nadish de Silva is a Canada Research Chair in the Mathematics of Quantum Computation and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University.  Broadly, his research interests include quantum information and computation; nonlocality and contextuality; and operator algebras and noncommutative geometry. He is keenly interested in helping to elucidate the structural origins of computational and communicational advantages in both concrete quantum models and abstract postclassical models. These questions sit at the foundations of logic, computer science, and physics, and involve disparate areas of maths: e.g. algorithms & complexity theory, functional analysis, number theory, and category theory.