Mid November a bunch of us had the pleasure of going to Helsinki, the captial of Finland and, arguably, the Nordic capital of quantum startups. In any case, what we learned did confirm that there is a lot of interesting Finish activities going on in the quantum area – both theoretically and experimentally.
Perhaps the most interesting part was a visit to the Low Temperature Lab at Aalto university. (By “low temperature” we are not referring not mean average Finish Winter temperature, we are talking milli Kelvins.) Several setups, involving extremely cold “fridges”, were constructed for various quantum sensing applications – including an ambitious quest to measure quantum effects in gravity.
Our trip, aiming both at learning more about Nordic quantum activities and at raising cohesion within our hub, also involved a visit to Helsinki University. In addition to an inspiring visit to a lab aimed at curious school children and youths, we learned about diverse topics such as quantum machine learning, post quantum cryptography and the benefits of using a combinatorial approach to quantum circuits – only to name a few.
For a few photos from the trip, please follow this link.
November 7th to 9th we had the pleasure of hosting a November School on Quantum Computing. At the risk of appearing cocky: Beforehand we were very proud of the program we had put together. And the lecturers did not let us down!
Several aspects of quantum computing were addressed. To name a few:
Quantum error correction
Quantum annealing
Quantum reservoir computing
Quantum hardware
Quantum computing for quantum chemistry
Quantum software engineering
Quantum states encoded in neural networks
Quantum noise
The lecturers included both academic researchers and representatives from the industry, specifically from D-Wave and IBM.
We believe it is fair to say that many large quantum leaps were made in the participants’ knowledge in quantum computing. In addition to our own PhD and Master students, people from Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Oslo, Lund University, Simula and the Norwegian School of Economics.
The venue provided a very nice atmosphere for getting to know more of the many flavours of quantum computing – and the growing community of people within the field.
Read more about it on the School’s website. Here you will also find the slides from most of the lectures – and a gallery. As small excerpt from this gallery is seen below.
Proud organizers: Andre Laestadius and Sergiy Denysov.The venue: Holmenkollen Park Hotel.Some of the participants at Roseslottet.
AI and Machine Learning are vitally important for Ruter and Quantum Advantage is something the company is paying a serious attention to. This year Ruter’s AI department runs the second project on gauging the potential of quantum computing as a tool to address the specific use-cases Ruter deals with on daily basis.
Last Friday we were invited to the Ruter’s AI Day and asked to present one of our quantum computers. We did so and gained a substantial interests from the event participants. It was nice to see that quantum computing provokes thoughts – and curiosity – even in the senior IT professionals.
Our visiting researcher Maksym Teslyk is presenting work which is part of his Ph.D. dissertation. It relates to both classical and quantum physical information theory and to general relativity. The picture is Kip Thorne’s black hole visualization from the movie Interstellar.
Abstract:
A spherical system of mass M is represented as a set of Unruh horizons. The approach allows to estimate the total entropy of Unruh radiation from the set and calculate its ratio to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. The contribution of mass and spin s of the emitted particles is taken into account. For large values of M, the ratio exhibits susceptibility to the intrinsic degrees of freedom and varies from 0% (s = 0) to 19% (s = 5/2).
Time and place: Thursday Nov. 16th, room PS439 in Pilestredet 35.
Typically, atoms and molecules exposed to strong laser field, which, incidentally, was the topic of this year’s Nobel prize in physics, are described theoretically and computationally without considering magnetic interactions. However, with strong enough fields and low/high enough photon energies, this approach breaks down – rendering the problem much tougher.
This was one of several topics for discussion.
Morten and I also had the pleasure to learn about ongoing activities within quantum information technology at the University of Warsaw – both theoretically and experimentally. We were quite impressed by their various labs – and their efficient setups.
Impressive was also a relevant word for describing the city. Well worth a visit!
Something to stretch towards: Julia Derlikiewicz (left) and Marie Skłodowska Curie (right).
We thank our hosts, Katarzyna, Julia, Deeksha, Jurek, and Mihai, so much for their overwhelming hospitality and hope that we can return the favor at some point.
Tuesday Nov. 17th we have the pleasure of hearing Noah Oldfield, from Simula Research Lab, presenting results and research question related to his ongoing project. It involves software testing on actual quantum computers. See the abstract below for more details.
Quantum program outputs enable the development of unique quality assurance techniques. Our research focuses on efficiently distinguishing a specialized ideal state vector from the sampled state vector of a program using inference techniques.
To accomplish this, we utilized a hill climbing algorithm for stochastic searches between basis transformations, circumventing the exponential scaling of brute force searches with increased qubit numbers. We conducted tests on a suite of automatically generated faulty programs.
For those programs with state vectors representable in the Hadamard basis, we observed improved testing runtimes and enhanced phase gate fault detection.
We are pleased to see that the Kode24, and online magazine for developers, has taken an interest for quantum computing – again. Under the heading “Hva er greia med …” [What’s the deal with …], this interview, conducted by journalist Kurt Lekanger, introduces a few of the basics.
As a part of our contributions to this year’s Forskningsdagene, the OsloMet Quantum Hub had the pleasure of contributing to OsloMet’s actitiveis at Holmlia. The Makerspace at our faculty was responsible for making Ungforsk happen – with an very interesting program put together to spur the curiosity of youth school pupils. Indeed an impressive job planning, announcing and implementing. Kudos to Notto Thelle, Kersti Fosse Blålid – and all other colleges and voluenteers involved. Read more about what went on at Ungforsk here:
Slightly younger pupils were invited to a mini-Forskningstorg where one of the stands was dedicated to introducing them to quantum technology. Thanks, Aleksandar Davidov, Bendik Dalen and Kristian Wold, for your efforts!
The events took place 20th and 21st of September. A total of 400 pupils got a glimpse of quantum technology – first and foremost through playing Quantum Moves – a game developed at Aarhus University addressing quantum control and adiabatic quantum computing. Actually, the game is surprisingly addictive …
Olav-Johan Øye has, under the heading student stories, written a nice piece about Maryam and her work at Ruter – the public company that organizes public transport in the Oslo region.
Her work involves both quantum and AI technology. Read all about it here:
A while ago, in an episode of the popular Scandinavian talk show Skavlan, the founder of Norwegian Air Shuttle, Bjørn Kjos, met with famous mathematician and Fields medalist Cedric Villani. Kjos was talking about how he had been trying to solve the Schrödinger equation – seemingly impressing Villani quite a bit. “Wow, you are brave!” he exclaimed. However, I suppose he would have been even more impressed if Kjos had taken on the Dirac equation.
You may have learned that when material things start approaching the speed of light, the absolute speed limit of nature, our world starts looking strange. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, things become shorter and time evolves more slowly.
Perhaps you have also heard that no-one has succeeded in formulating a theory comprising both quantum physics and relativity. Luckily, this is only partly true. More specifically, it is true when it comes to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which deals with gravitation and is essential to our understanding of how the universe came about and evolves.
General theory’s predecessor, special relativity, however, is happily united by quantum physics. This union is entitled the Dirac equation, which the Brit Paul Dirac introduced in 1928 – only a couple of years after Erwin Schrödinger published his famous equation. Dirac and Schrödinger shared a Nobel price for that only a few years later.
Paul Dirac in 1933 – the year when he shared a Nobel price in physics with Erwin Schrödinger.
The Dirac equation includes the Schrödinger equation as a special case – except that it also encompasses the strange notion of electron spin. This is, however, not the strangest thing that emerges from Dirac’s equation.
The equation is plagued with several issues which makes it hard to solve – also numerically. One of these issues is that it features solutions of negative energy – in addition to the expected ones. The meaning of these odd solutions remained a mystery for a while – even to Paul Dirac himself. In an interesting interview conducted by Friedrich Hund in 1982 – well worth seeing – he talks about how he spent a year or so pondering on how to deal with them. His solution, eventually, was to postulate a sea of occupied states – a sea from which particles could be promoted leaving behind a hole. Somewhat exotic, you may think.
These notions are, as it turns out, related to the existence of anti-matter. For every particle there is an odd twin with much of the same properties – except that most of them have opposite sign. Not a very intuitive conclusion; you cannot blame anyone – including Dirac – for being puzzled by this notion. I guess this is one of the many concepts emerging from quantum physics which merits the exclamation “who ordered that?!”. (The quote originates from Isodor Rabi, the father of the MR technique, when he heard about the discovery of the muon particle, one of the electron’s heavier siblings.)
Nonetheless, anti-matter exists; we have seen it. Moreover, we have seen that pairs of particle and anti-particle may be created – they may emerge out of nothing, so to speak. Needless to say, this complicates life for anyone who may want to describe quantum physics close to the speed of light theoretically or computationally. We cannot even say for sure how many particles we are dealing with!
Luckily for us, there is a window between the point where classical, classical in the meaning non-relativistic, breaks down and the point at which pair creation needs to be considered. For instance, with the strongest of lasers, electrons may be accelerated to a certain fraction of the speed of light – thus necessitating a relativistic treatment. Even in cases where these laser fields are not strong enough to start producing particle anti-particle pairs, the numerical description is still hard enough. Thus, we were thrilled to see that relativistic effects could, to a large extent, be treated by introducing the concept of relativistic mass into the Schrödinger equation. In effect, the electron becomes a bit heavier as it becomes faster. This, in turn, contributes to enhance the effect of atomic stabilization – the notion that an atom becomes less likely to be torn apart by a laser field as you increase the strength of the laser. In other words: Yet another non-intuitive feature of quantum physics – perhaps a topic for a future blog post.
