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:

We have invited André Schleife from Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to present "Quantum computers as co-processors? Materials simulation in the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute”

Title: Quantum computers as co-processors? Materials simulation in the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute

Abstract:
Quantum computers are envisioned to work alongside supercomputers. This idea, quantum-centric supercomputing, is central to the recently expanded IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAI), where NCSA's Delta and DeltaAI systems are being connected to IBM quantum hardware. In this talk I will give an overview of IIDAI quantum activities in my group, what we have learned on today's pre-fault-tolerant devices, and where we are heading.

I will start with the question if we can trust the numbers: We compared quantum simulations directly with laboratory experiments. On up to 50 superconducting qubits, a quantum–classical workflow computes the magnetic excitation spectrum of the spin-chain material KCuF₃, and the result compares quantitatively with inelastic neutron scattering. On a 40-site spin chain, mid-circuit measurements give direct access to spin transport, reproducing superdiffusive and diffusive behavior. Next, I will show how quantum embedding splits a materials problem between classical and quantum resources. For defects near the surface of α-Al₂O₃, classical HPC describes the host crystal and a compact active space runs on the quantum processor. With error mitigation, the results agree with exact solutions within chemical accuracy. For Frenkel excitons, the prototypical optical excitations of molecular materials, a deep-learning framework learns the hardware's noise pattern and outperforms conventional post-selection on real devices. The relation between practical use in materials science and prospect of quantum advantage will be discussed.

Biography

André Schleife is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Materials Research Laboratory. He received his Diploma and Ph.D. from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before joining Illinois in 2013. His group develops and applies first-principles methods for excited electronic states and their real-time dynamics, increasingly combining high-performance computing with machine learning and quantum computing. He is chair of the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society and is also active in computational-physics education and curriculum development.