Matt Otten has won an Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award, offered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The program intends to support early-career scientists and engineers who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. Nearly 40 awards were expected to be made in this cycle.
The three-year, $450,000 award will fund a postdoctoral fellow in Otten’s group, who will work on quantum characterization, verification, and validation (QCVV) of quantum computers. QCVV asks if a quantum computer is working and what the device’s limitations are, in an effort to engineer a better system in future iterations.
With any quantum computer, researchers input different tasks and calculations under different conditions, then receive back some classical data that describes the quantum state. Otten describes what happens between input and output as “a black box.”
“Our work is trying to open that black box and put in physics,” Otten says. “And we’re starting from a good place: we already have good models of what those qubits do and how they’re supposed to behave, and we can fit the parameters of the model to the observations of the data.”
Otten’s group will collaborate with experimentalists on their quantum computers. If the data fit the model, it suggests that the quantum computer is behaving as predicted and that the researchers understand the full process. But if the date do not — and given that a major impediment to quantum computing has been understanding and controlling errors, this scenario is more likely — then the researchers will need to determine why.
“That’s the goal of the research, to develop the techniques so that we can tie the errors that we see in the data to a physical source for that error, and then we can give feedback to the experimentalists,” Otten says. “And maybe they can tell me what went wrong without doing this complicated QCVV, but as we build bigger and bigger systems, this problem becomes harder to solve.”