2 - Let the Chief Ducks Speak!

I didn't plan to publish, but this week (11/4/2022) I attended a quantum computing conference at the Weizmann Institute of Science, which brought the top-of-the-line researchers to speak about quantum computing, generally and not about error correction. But...

tl;dr - All the 4 lecturers, everyone in his own way, emphasized the importance of fault-tolerance in quantum computing and talked about ways to reduce the noise of qubits. Weather from a theoretical perspective, from the application point of view, or physics methods to reduce noise.

The Full Story

First on the stage was the famous QC researcher Prof. Dorit Aharonov, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a CSO in QEDMA, an Israeli awesome startup, which is probably the leading duck company in the world. She talked about "The quantum computing revolution: a tale of a theory becoming a reality". Prof. Aharonov said that the advantage of quantum computation in the NISQ era is much less clear. Later on, she emphasized that the quantum advantage holds, even in the presence of small local imprecisions and noise, if the noise is smaller enough (a theorem that she and Prof. Michael Ben-Or proved in 1999!). This is only thanks to quantum error correction codes, that are squeezing this noise if the amount of qubits is big enough.

Second to speak was Prof. Elica Kyoseva, a world expert in modeling drugs discovery into a quantum algorithm, from Boehringer Ingelheim, and spoke about: "Quantum Computing use cases from the pharmaceutical industry". She told about very interesting use-cases that her research tried to solve. Unfortunately, long years of research did not bring good results. Her models needed bigger backends, with fault-tolerance schemes to reduce the noise of the logical qubit. See the green rectangle area in her slide? This is what she needs in order to have meaningful results - to be below the error correction threshold, in order to run over a fault-tolerant computer. Alternatively, some of the use cases can be NISQ (blue area), but they will need a much lower error rate. Anyway, so far in all of their models, they assumed a perfect not noisy qubit... I raised my hand at the end and asked her if she thinks that the world should put more resources, and money into treating quantum error correction, Prof. Kyoseva is a well-experienced duck, and she sure agreed, and also said that we should not lose focus on the applications side. Her ideas are pretty awesome and I will definitely keep following her work.

Brace yourself! Next to talk is Dr. Roman Lutchyn a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Quantum. Microsoft, just as in 1975, is understanding that establishing well the fundamentals of the computer, is more important than hurrying up to try to use it.

Dr. Lutchyn gave a great talk about: "Topological Quantum Computation with Majorana Zero Modes". His lecture was about a very interesting trick to minimize noise and to let a qubit fix itself, without using error correction, but just by creating more complex creatures that are called Zero Modes Majoranas. We won't dive into the details, but we will just say that as long as the qubits are well separated from each other, they feel a more different environment (the evil source of noise)

Last but not least, Dr. Serge Rosenblum, a researcher at The Weizmann Institute, and a scientific advisor in 2 Israeli startup companies that develop a quantum computer. His lecture was: "Quantum Computing with Schr?dinger's cats".

Dr. Rosenblum said that "The superposition is much more fragile than the classical bit... errors are really fundamental problems... we have got to do something about these errors". He talked about decoding the qubit on many photons, instead of on one photon, which will make the state less sensitive, and more stable, like a quantum state cat. This method seems very promising and interesting, next to the fact that it will be complicated with any arbitrary error. Let's hope that his cats and the duck, can live together.

I wrote this article spontaneously following today's conference after I was (not) surprised to see that the error correction issue, is a core subject in the way to a future with a quantum computer.

The next conference I will attend is one that I am expecting for more than a year, the return of qubit! The community that started my way in quantum computing. It will happen on 25.4 in Tel Aviv and will host two ducks that I am a big fan of them - Dr. Tal David, and Prof. Nadav Katz. Will they be able to pass their whole lecture without emphasizing the importance of fault tolerance? Well, I don't mind putting all in about this one.

This time for real, in the next time we will learn the fundamentals of quantum computing theory that are needed to understand QEC.

Stay tuned...