Research Technology Master Calendar

NCSA, in collaboration with IQUIST, invites you to the monthly Quantum User Group gatherings for the campus community.

The Quantum User Group (QUG) is being formed to bring together several efforts that have been underway and to raise awareness of activities of which members of the campus community may wish to take advantage. The QUG creates a forum for interaction and information sharing in order to facilitate growing the local community of researchers with interest in quantum computing and raise awareness about emerging quantum computing capabilities and for those exploring the use of hybrid classical/quantum computing to share their experiences--both successes and challenges-with others. 

We encourage researchers with challenging research problems that can potentially benefit from quantum computing along with those who are curious about this to help determine the potential for benefiting your research to participate.  Graduate students and postdocs affiliated with research in classical as well as quantum computing and all campus community members interested in quantum computing are also encouraged to attend.

Agenda:

1. Featured Talk – 30 min:

Speaker: Xiaojuan Ma

Title: Topology and density control of satellite-defined photonic quantum networks

Abstract

Creating photonic quantum networks by distributing entangled photon pairs through low Earth orbit satellites is a promising technological advance. A recent work has studied a model of such networks and reported the presence of a heavy-tailed degree distribution. This heterogeneous structure is highly undesirable when it comes to the quantum memory utilization efficiency and network robustness under malicious attack. In this work, however, we show that such a topology is not necessarily inherent to satellite-based quantum networks. We theoretically analyze factors that determine the connection probability between two nodes and propose a principled design methodology to control both the topology and density of the resulting network. We present numerical evidence that our method can continuously transform the heterogeneous heavy-tailed network into a more homogeneous Erdős-Rényi-like random network with the prescribed level of density as characterized by the average or maximal degree. Such results are in good agreement with our theoretical analysis, which not only predicts the qualitative structural transition but also provides a quantitative way to estimate important network features during the process. Under our control strategies, the resulting network can achieve various desirable properties, such as a short path length and diameter, high quantum memory utilization efficiency, and enhanced robustness against attack. We believe the design principle proposed in this work represents an important step towards building and controlling functionally efficient satellite-photonic quantum networks in the future.

2. Tutorial- 30 min:

Title: High-level quantum programming with CQAM

Intended audience: campus members interested in quantum programming and quantum computing

Pre-requisites:

• A local Rust compiler and cargo
• Access to CQAM repository: https://github.com/nunezco2/cqam

Summary

Quantum programming involves using frameworks hosted in classical environments to implement quantum algorithms and execute them on simulators or actual QPUs. While most quantum programs are written in terms of circuits (Qiskit, Circ, PennyLane), the process remains painstaking. Thinking about problem solving at a higher level benefitted classical computing and democratized an explosion of applications. We show in this tutorial the use of a classical-quantum high-level language that allows hybrid programs to be implemented, executed and tested in simulators and QPUs. Prior programming experience is preferable in any programming language. We will implement two quantum algorithms using CQAM, a language and compiler suite developed at NCSA under the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. Attendees will be able to locally execute code on two simulators.