VaQOS: Variational quantum optical simulators

Extended project summary:

Quantum theory, developed to understand the behavior of the universe on a small scale, has been one of the greatest revolutions of physics. Despite introducing concepts that clash with our everyday experience, such as the possibility of an object being in multiple states at once, or the entanglement between spatially separated objects, quantum physics is one of the most successful theories developed by the humankind.

One of the most promising applications of quantum physics is quantum computing. Physicists believe that a computer that makes use of the laws of the quantum theory could solve problems that are intractable even with the most powerful current supercomputers. This new form of computing could bring disruptive advances in areas as important as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, pharmacology, or finance.

However, we still lack quantum computers capable of solving these problems. The main obstacle we face is decoherence, that is, the loss of information due to the interaction between the quantum processor and its environment or imperfect control. Therefore, existing quantum computers are small in size and lack error-correction protocols.

The VaQOS project will try to unlock this situation through the study of variational quantum optical simulators, that is, systems in which quantum emitters (such as atoms or ions) interact with light at the level of individual photons. The plan is to harness the advantages of these systems (such as new types of interactions between emitters or greater resilience to noise and decoherence) to, in the short term, develop hybrid algorithms that use a classical and a quantum part and that can be used in current quantum computers, and in the long term, scale their size to implement purely quantum algorithms with error correction.