QSE Quantum Seminar - Cristina Cirstoiu & Shabir Barzanjeh

Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Cristina Cirstoiu from Quantinuum, who will give the talk "From noisy quantum simulation to logical benchmarking on trapped-ion devices" and Shabir Barzanjeh from University of Calgary, who will give the talk "Advancements in Integrated Quantum Circuits: Photon Conversion and Entanglement Generation" on Friday May 23rd from 11:15am to 1:30pm 
Location: CM 1 120

Pizzas will be available between the seminars at 12:00. All PhDs, postdocs, students, and PIs are welcome to join us.

TITLE: "From noisy quantum simulation to logical benchmarking on trapped-ion devices" & "Advancements in Integrated Quantum Circuits: Photon Conversion and Entanglement Generation".

ABSTRACT:

1. "From noisy quantum simulation to logical benchmarking on trapped-ion devices": Continued improvements in two-qubit gate fidelity on Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum computers have enabled both demonstrations of quantum error correction components and noisy digital quantum simulations that challenge the limits of classical computations. First, I discuss a dynamical simulation of the 2D Ising model on the H2 device, employing combined error suppression and mitigation techniques. We observe Floquet pre-thermalisation at timescales where state-of-the-art classical simulations become extremely difficult, if not infeasible for the particular quenches considered. Second, I introduce a framework for robustly characterising logical errors, and show how adapting similar physical error suppression leads to improved and reliable benchmarking of key building blocks in quantum error correction.
2. "Advancements in Integrated Quantum Circuits: Photon Conversion and Entanglement Generation": Utilizing nonlinearity as a quantum resource not only enables the creation of entanglement, a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, but also plays a vital role in advancing quantum computing capabilities. In this presentation, I will explain recent advancements made by our team in harnessing nonlinear processes to generate entanglement and squeezing. The discussion includes the utilization of integrated optical and microwave circuits to develop robust nonclassical sources as well as for microwave-to-optical transduction. The first part of the talk is devoted to the use of nanomechanical resonators for photon conversion and transduction, while the second part explores the application of superconducting kinetic inductance thin films for signal amplification and squeezing in the microwave domain.
    

1. Cristina Cirstoiu is a Lead Scientist at Quantinuum. Her research spans quantum and classical algorithms, error characterisation and mitigation. Before joining Quantinuum she was a researcher in Computer Science at Oxford University. She obtained a PhD in Physics from Imperial College London on quantum information theory and a B.A/Masters in Mathematics from Cambridge University. 
2. Shabir Barzanjeh: My research goals are directed towards both experimental and theoretical studying the dynamics and interactions of nanofabricated electrical, mechanical, magnonic, and photonic quantum circuits. Building upon a robust foundation in superconducting cQED acquired during my postdoc with Prof. David DiVincenzo at RWTH Aachen (Germany), I was awarded the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship to undertake postdoctoral research at Prof. Johannes Fink's group (IST Austria), where I focused on experimentally developing integrated electro- and optomechanical devices, as well as superconducting circuits operating in the quantum regime. After that, I embarked on my current position as a group leader at the University of Calgary, where I now lead a research group dedicated to hybrid quantum circuits (both microwave and optics). Our primary objective is to integrate superconducting circuits with optical systems to build large-scale quantum networks using phonons and magnons as the mediators.