[LA-SiGMA] LASiGMA Seminar Wednesday, September 3 - Helmut G. Katzgraber, 3:30pm

[shelley lee]

Dear All,

Dr. Helmut G. Katzgraber will be giving a talk, Wednesday, September 3rd,
3:30pm in room 1008B at the Digital Media Center, Louisiana State
University. The title of his talk is "Quantum computers: Are we there yet?"

Abstract:
Ca quantum computers indeed meet the promise of doing complex calculations
faster than classical computers based on transistor technologies? While the
holy grail of a programmable universal quantum computer will probably still
take decades to reach, one can already begin to answer this question by
testing programmable quantum annealing machines that are currently being
built. These machines, such as D-Wave 2, use a non-mainstream method known
as adiabatic quantum annealing to perform optimization tasks. Very recently,
tests performed by different research teams on the D-Wave 2 machine using
spin glasses as a benchmark have shown that, although the machine indeed
appears to tap into quantum effects, it shows no speedup over traditional
computing architectures. Here, I present reasons why this might be the case:
The benchmarks used to test the D-Wave machine are encoded in the
restrictive Chimera topology dictated by fabrication constraints of the
device. Our finding is that, for the standard benchmark Ising spin glass on
the Chimera lattice, its energy landscape is actually rather simple. This
means that searching for a ground state of an Ising spin glass on the
Chimera lattice is an easier exercise in optimization for both quantum, as
well as vanilla classical optimization methods, i.e., not a measure of
sufficient rigor to detect quantum speedup. Our results thus show that a
careful design of the hardware architecture and benchmark problems is key
when building quantum annealing machines and we present alternative
benchmark strategies in the quest for detecting quantum speedup.

Work done in collaboration with R. Andrist, F. Hamze, A. Ochoa and Z. Zhu.

Biography:
Dr. Helmut Katzgraber was born in Lima, Peru and is Austrian citizen. After
growing up in Lima and completing military duties in the Austrian army, he
studied physics at ETH Zurich where he graduated with a Diploma with
distinction under the supervision of Prof. Gianni Blatter. He received his
PhD in Physics in 2001 under the supervision of Prof. A. Peter Young at the
University of California Santa Cruz for numerical studies of spin-glass
systems. After a one-year postdoctoral position with Profs. Gergely Zimanyi
and Richard Scalettar at the University of California Davis where he worked
on numerical studies of magnetic recording media, he returned to ETH Zurich
in 2002 as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Gianni Blatter at the
Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2007 he was awarded a Swiss National
Science Foundation professorship and in 2009 he joined Texas A&M as a
tenure-track assistant professor. In 2011 he received an NSF CAREER award
and since 2012 he is an associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy
Department at Texas A&M University. His main research fields in
computational physics are the investigation of disordered and complex
systems, as well as the study of topologically-protected quantum computing.
Since 2013 he is member of the Texas A&M Materials Science and Engineering
program and since 2014 he is external faculty member at the Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico.

Also available on site at the locations below.
UNO - 234, Liberal Arts Building
LATech - 122, Nethken Hall
SUBR - 211 J.B. Moore Hall
Xavier - 226 Qatar Pavillion

Please note, this seminar will ONLY be accessible through HD
videoconferencing. Adobe connect will NOT be offered.

Regards,
Shelley Lee
Project Coordinator
225-578-0465




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