Software-driven research

Quantum computing is undergoing a process of commercialization: efforts to advance this technology are migrating from academic labs to also include startups and large corporations. This has created research opportunities that combine fundamental science with the development of quantum software. In this talk, we will describe the software-driven research paradigm of the algorithms team at Xanadu, where new fundamental results in quantum computing emerge from the desire to build better software tools. We describe algorithms for simulating quantum optics, methods to build universal quantum circuits for quantum chemistry, and quantum algorithms for molecular geometry optimization, and explain how these results originate from efforts to develop quantum software.

About the speaker:

Juan Miguel Arrazola has a MSc in Physics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Physics-Quantum Information from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore before joining Xanadu in 2017, where he currently leads the quantum algorithms team.