Abstract:

In the annals of classical computation, ternary systems were considered and even fabricated. Despite the promising theoretical advantages, they were discarded in favor of the well-known and established binary ones. One of the main reasons was the difficulty to find a controllable physical system that supports a three-dimensional encoding. In contrast, quantum systems are naturally high-dimensional which allows us to consider the use of other bases both to compute more efficiently or to mimic some Nature systems more accurately. Current quantum devices are composed of a few quantum information units, being the scalability of such systems a big challenge. By exploiting the higher levels of these devices, we can increase the available Hilbert space to perform the simulations. Although this potential advantage is not exponential, it might prove valueble in the near term. In this talk I will review some of the key aspects of high-dimensional quantum computiation, its potential and its limitations and challenges.

Bio:

Alba Cervera-Lierta is a Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She earned her PhD in 2019 at the University of Barcelona, where she studied her physics degree and a Msc in particle physics. After her PhD, she moved to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow at the Alán Aspuru-Guizik group. She works on near-term quantum algorithms and their applications, high-dimensional quantum computation, and artificial intelligence strategies in quantum physics. Since October of 2021, she is the coordinator of the Quantum Spain project, an initiative to boost the quantum computing ecosystem that will adquire and operate a quantum computer at the BSC-CNS.