Quantum computation offers a revolutionary approach to information processing, providing a route to efficiently solve classically hard problems such as factorisation and optimisation as well as unlocking new applications in material science and quantum chemistry that could in future be scaled up to accelerate drug design or optimised materials for aerospace and manufacturing. Whilst large-scale applications will require thousands of qubits, in the near-term small (100 qubit) quantum processors will reach a regime in which the quantum hardware is able to solve problems not accessible even on the largest available conventional supercomputers.

This project will utilise the SQuAre hardware platform for quantum computing based on scalable arrays of neutral atoms that is able to overcome the challenges to scaling of competing technologies, offering up to 225 identical and high quality qubits which has been developed through the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership with M Squared Lasers.

Already our team has demonstrated the highest single-qubit gate fidelities for large scale arrays on this hardware, and the aim of the PhD is to work together with the quantum software team lead by Prof. Andrew Daley, to design new analogue and digital algorithms tailored for the neutral-atom platform to target industrially-relevant computation and optimisation problems, and perform pioneering demonstrations on the SQuAre system.

A major focus of this work will be developing new approaches to performing fast local addressing to enhance the programmability, and to extend hardware performance to implement high-fidelity multi-qubit gate operations to enable efficient implementation of complex digital algorithms.

Further information

The successful student will join the neutral atom quantum computing team at Strathclyde run by Dr. Jonathan Pritchard, with recent highlights including demonstrations of new two-qubit gate protocols and demonstrations of high-fidelity single-qubit gates and readout on large scale arrays. For more details visit the group webpage.