Presentation of Project RESQ

Presentation of Project RESQ

Objectives

RESQ is an interdisciplinary project regrouping physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and statisticians. One of the main objectives of the project is to bridge the cultural gap between these different disciplines and to develop a community of scientists from these disciplines that can work together and communicate together.

More specific objectives of the project are

• to understand how quantum information can be manipulated in small scale systems;
• to improve our understanding of the nature of quantum information, both at a fundamental level and from the pragmatic point of view of testing quantum systems;
• to understand how information can be processed in distributed quantum systems, both from the point of view of algorithms and from the point of view of security and cryptography;
• and to design new quantum algorithms, study the power of quantum property testers, and explore the ingredients of a basic toolkit for designing quantum algorithms

Description of the work

The work is divided in four work packages, corresponding to the four objectives stated above.

• In workpackage 1, small scale systems will be dealt with. The project will characterize entanglement (for instance using techniques borrowed from communication complexity), and devise methods for quantum information processing in specific physical systems, for instance by adapting quantum algorithms to small systems
• In workpackage 2, "quantumness" will be studied from the theoretical and pragmatic point of view. The project will design either test for the quantumness of devices or tests for correctness of quantum devices. It will characterize resources required for carrying out specific quantum information processing tasks (for instance quantum communication, quantum computation, quantum dynamics, state or dynamics estimation). It will lead to a better understand the relation between quantum information and classical information.
• In workpackage 3, the subject is "networks": information processing in distributed quantum systems. The project will devise methods to carry out distributed quantum computing and distributed quantum cryptography, such as the Byzantine agreement problem or quantum coin flipping; and will devise methods to carry out fast quantum communication.
• In workpackage 4, the project deals with quantum algorithms and algorithmic methods. More specifically the project will devise quantum algorithms (for instance quantum algorithms for algebra and number theory), study the power of quantum property testers, and explore the ingredients of a basic toolkit for quantum algorithms (such as quantum random walks, adiabatic algorithms or ultra fast computing).

The consortium for this project combines the expertise from physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians in a collaborative research effort to achieve the above objectives. In this way, the project will also contribute to "closing the persistent cultural gap between computer scientists and physicists/engineers" as observed by the European Commission.

Milestones and expected results

Expected results of the project are a deepening of the insight in quantum information and important contributions to practical implementations of quantum information processing and communication. The project expects to increase our understanding of the scalability of quantum computing devices and to design algorithms that will exploit the information processing capabilities of real experimental devices.

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