Physics (Internal)

The phase diagram of quantum state preparation : limitations and complexity

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Preparing quantum states efficiently and with high fidelity is a key stepping stone towards building a reliable and scalable quantum computer. In this talk I will present some of the fundamental limitations of quantum state preparation. In particular I will discuss how having finite preparation time leads to different phases in terms of the difficulty of obtaining optimal fidelity. We find strong evidence for the existence of a generic NP-hard phase analogous to a spin glass, where finding the optimal preparation protocol is exponentially hard. We support these findings using different machine learning approaches such as reinforcement learning and simulated annealing.