Hi and welcome to Mithrandir24601's AMA. His introductory meta post is here. Please keep unrelated discussion out of this room for the duration of the AMA and use the backup room. Take it away, @Mithrandir24601!
I'm a PhD student, studying quantum engineering and my PhD topic is most likely going to be on simulating non-hermitian Hamiltonians on a quantum chip. I've got a Masters in Mathematical Physics and a Bachelors in Physics with Computer Science. I've got a variety of interests that include music, reading, tea and chocolate. I'm also into religion/theology (there were a few questions on this)
More specifically, academically, I'm interested in things like quantum computing and measurements. Currently, I've just finished a really interesting project on looking at noise in what's known as t-designs, which are used in randomised benchmarking of quantum chips
Oh, and I've just came back from the seminar that's on the star-board!
Anyway, first question: **What role has religion/theology played in your studies?**
Directly, none, although it has influenced things that I'd consider looking at due to the people I get to know being involved in that, such as medical physics
Indirectly, possibly, as a large number of my friends are from my time as chapel clerk, which obviously influences decisions to some extent, but this is a lot harder to quantify
Does someone else want to introduce the questions?
@Mithrandir24601 hi thx for your session! suggest you cover all the questions you want in lull periods but maybe try to encourage participation by audience at this pt?
@vzn Yes, although they'd be more typical Northern Irish Presbyterian, while I'd consider myself a lot more (high) anglican
Personally, I don't see any conflict - my Director of studies as well as other students I knew as an undergrad were (are) also religious. On the physics lab of where I did my undergrad, the phrase "The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein" is inscribed on the front entrance
please cover your dwave visit at some point! a whole wk? was geordie rose there? did you meet him? any opinion on the aaronson needling of the company? etc
So, I spent my entire undergrad learning from a bunch of religious and talented scientists as well as being friends with people like theologians, the dean of the chapel, the vicar etc. and we also had long (several hours over port, into the early hours of the next morning. The latest I got back from one of these was at 5am) discussions on things like this a few times a term
@AccidentalFourierTransform It is. It's also something that I've really realised I've taken to heart, along with things such as the meaning of 'Logos' (often translated as 'the word', which is the most inadequate translation ever)
Although, technically, all the stuff they did is possible from off-the-shelf equipment and slightly adapted telescopes, with an absolute ton of money :P
The tracking system already existed and has been used to track a plane flying along and transmit quantum signals
There are additional effects from the atmosphere, but they don't actually have that much of an effect, surprisingly. Atmospheric attenuation is really low as light's only attenuated in the first 10km or so of the atmosphere
@heather So it was really one of those moments like a lesser version of the discovery of special relativity when all the background physics was there, but it took someone really good to bring it together (and in this case, money) to get it working
But a year or two ago, this changed and suddenly, D-Wave is no longer overhyping as much. Since this happened, they've also got a lot closer to where classical computers are (for what they can solve) and so, they're not there yet... But they are close
And I agree with whoever it was that claimed that D-Wave have now brought the fight to the classical computing people. They have 2000 qubits and are nearly comparible
@vzn Who did I meet - I remember the faces, but not the names :P One person who gave a talk was the CFO (although this was brief)
@vzn There was a paper where D-Wave did something faster than a classical computer and it actually took the classical CSs some time to come up with something faster - to me, that was the turning point
@Mithrandir24601 yes ok there are a lot of papers trying to do benchmarking, if you can point at one you thought was influential/ turning pt itd be great...
(ps the buzzword for all this in the news/ science is so-called "quantum supremacy" in the sense of whether a classical or QC is "faster" aka "supreme")
@heather Thanks! I'll answer your questions at some point
So there are graphs where classical alone gets down to the best solution slowly, while D-Wave gets nearly there really quickly, at which point, classical can take over to cut the time down considerably
@Mithrandir24601 sounds like a big part of future research. ok amazing, thats 1hr already, time flies when youre having fun (or trying to figure out religion...!) everyone is free to stick around, hope Mithrandir can stay, its now open chat. would like to hear from everyone who attended, please let us know any reactions or just say hi :)
@DanielSank It's almost randomised benchmarking. Randomised benchmarking takes a t-design and does the same thing, only implements lots of gates at once (or something like that)
Personally, I view it as the theoretical version of randomised benchmarking, but I may be wrong
The problem with describing a t-design in that way is that it's a mathematical relation
we will apparently have an 8-waveguide universal chip. This is at least 3 qubits, but apparently, there are things you can do to get more qubits from the same number of photons. Again, I don't know if you can do this on a universal chip... IBM actually has 16... I'm at Bristol :)
My primary supervisor will be Anthony Laing. One of his post-docs and apparently someone from America that I've never met before will be secondary supervisors
@DanielSank the smallest 2 dimensional 2-design size is 10. The Clifford group [modulo phases...] is a common 3 design and the Paulis are a common 1 design
@vzn So, we have an 8-waveguide (3 qubit) universal chip. This will most likely get bigger as time goes on. Bristol also has a 2 qudit chip with some large number of dimensions
And finally(?) @heather - I started my PhD studies about a year ago (OK, 11 months). I'll be starting my actual PhD research in about a month (the stuff I've done so far are just small projects - I'm hoping to get a paper out of the t-design stuff at some point though :) )
@heather Optical (continuous variable because it's absurdly promising and other optical stuff is just interesting, although not quite as promising to my mind) and superconducting
@AccidentalFourierTransform He - I'm the guy sitting in the corner drinking tea. I always have tea :)
