Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Investigating experimental verification of quantum simulations

Presenting Author: Ryan Shaffer, University of California Berkeley
Contributing Author(s): Joe Broz, Nicole Greene, Eli Megidish, Wei-Ting Chen, Sara Mouradian, Shuqi Xu, Hartmut Häffner

Quantum simulation is expected to be an important application of quantum computers in the near future. When the simulation is occurring within a Hilbert space that is small enough to simulate classically, one can easily verify the results of a quantum experiment by comparing to the results of the classical simulation. However, when the computational complexity increases, one needs a way to verify the result of the quantum simulation without knowing independently what the result should be. For example, we have run vibrationally assisted energy transfer (VAET) simulations on two trapped-ion qubits, which is simple to verify classically; but if we wanted to verify such a simulation on a larger system, the problem quickly becomes intractable. We are exploring approaches to gain confidence in the results of such quantum simulations, such as providing bounds on possible errors, in a regime which cannot be verified classically.

(Session 5 : Sunday from 5:00pm - 7:00pm)