In support of open science, we’ve made publicly available the simulation code used in our recent study of using variational imaginary time evolution on hybrid classical-quantum computers to discover energy spectra. The code is hosted here on github, and includes a brief demo of its usage. Discover more of the code behind our papers on the code page.
For quantum error correction, if the error rate of our physical components is below a certain error threshold, we can decrease the overall computational error indefinitely by scaling up the code. To obtain the value of such a threshold, we need to simulate the quantum error correction circuit, which can only be done efficiently classically if there are only Pauli errors occurring in the circuit. Twirling is a technique that ‘twirl’ out the irregularity of an arbitrary Read more…
Place an elastic ball in a box and shake it. What is the total energy of the ball? In classical physics, it can be any number which depends on how hard you shook. Shake a tiny bit harder and you’ll add a tiny bit more energy. Bound quantum systems behave differently. They have discrete energy spectra. Place a quantum particle in a box, excite it, and measure the total energy – you’ll find there are a Read more…
Simon Benjamin was recently featured on the Y Combinator blog, a seed accelerator which has seeded companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit and Twitch. In the episode, which you can view here, Simon discusses the different approaches for constructing and scaling a quantum computer.
“Imaginary time is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as Read more…
We’ve added a guide on using the GNU Scientific library – a powerful C/C++ numerical methods library – on OSX and linux supercomputers (using the Oxford ARCUS-B as an example). Read it here!
We’ve added a guide on setting up a remote file system in OSX, so that you can edit files stored on a supercomputer as if they were on your own machine. Read it here!
These days, a lot of groups are trying to fabricate small sized quantum circuits with tens of qubits, and some useful algorithms to use them are proposed. To make the best of such circuits, we have to suppress the noise in the quantum circuits and we have proposed useful error suppression methods, without using conventional fault tolerant error correction techniques. For more details, please see the attached link. https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09271
Simulation is crucial to many sciences. We simulate cosmic events before we spy them in the skies. We simulate molecular dynamics to inform our synthesis of new drugs. We simulate electronic circuits before we build them, and quantum circuits are no exception. But simulating a quantum circuit is especially difficult. Quantum systems evolve in a complicated way, and keeping track precisely enough requires lots of computer memory and time. Every additional qubit in a simulated Read more…
We’ve added a guide on installing ProjectQ, a powerful Python quantum-computer simulation framework, on the ARCHER and ARCUS-B supercomputers. Read it here!