QUERA COMPUTING INCORPORATED — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF20A-T003

Description

Quantum computing technologies have now reached sufficient scale and maturity that it is possible to interrogate real-world applications at a non-simulatable scale, and with the potential to outperform their classical counterparts on specific tasks (so-called “Quantum Advantage”). At the same time, they have not yet achieved such maturity as to allow the hardware to be abstracted in a way to permit practical algorithms design without taking account of real device architecture, understanding sources of error, and closely coupling the inspiration for algorithms with the mitigation of hardware-imposed constraints. This program capitalizes on recent breakthrough improvements in neutral-atom quantum computing architectures to develop new, and native, algorithms with promise for quantum speedup on near-term devices. If successful in identifying new hardware-specific algorithms, it would proceed to implement them on commercial hardware, validate their performance on simulable scales, and measure results beyond that scale.  In phase I of this program, QuEra’s algorithm team and the Harvard team will work closely to develop near-term quantum algorithms and gate designs native to the neutral-atom hardware being built at QuEra. Specifically, this effort would develop new methods of quantum optimization, high-fidelity multi-qubit gate operations and efficient compilation, and new applications in the NMR spectral inference problem; these developments will heavily rely on the expertise of these collaboration on neutral-atom NISQ algorithm development, neutral-atom quantum gate designs, quantum optimal control, and quantum machine learning.  The close coupling between algorithm and hardware design will permit iterative approaches to be taken, in which new algorithmic insight can guide machine design, and real-device implementation can guide analysis of subsequent generations of algorithms. Taken together, these efforts hold the promise to dramatically alter the landscape for commercial cloud computing for both civil and military applications, and directly address the unique hardware advantages and constraints of the most highly scalable platform, now based on neutral atoms.