Machiel Blok (UCB): "Processing Quantum Information with Superconducting Circuits: How a Quantum Computer Could Teach Us Something About Black Holes"

Wednesday 30 May 2018, 12:00 → 13:00 US/Pacific

4001 (050)

Abstract

The potential computational advantage of future quantum computers has inspired industry and academia to build quantum hardware using a variety of physical implementations. Although current quantum processors with a few tens of quantum bits are still far away from reliably implementing any quantum algorithm with proven speedup, they are on the verge of becoming classically intractable. This raises the questions if there are any interesting problems that current, noisy quantum computers can solve and what the ideal design of such near-term devices would be. In this talk I will discuss the current capabilities and challenges for scaling up a particularly promising platform for quantum computing based on superconducting circuits, by introducing our 8-qubit quantum processor developed at UC Berkeley. Furthermore, I will show our latest results where we implement ternary quantum logic gates which do not only increase computational complexity, but also allow for the implementation of a maximally scrambling operation which is a key component in a recently proposed proof-of-principle experiment to simulate the decoding of Hawking radiation to recover a quantum state from a black hole.