Atomic Physics Seminars

We present results from a programmable quantum computer comprised of a chain of individually trapped 171Yb+ ions. It features individual laser beam addressing and individual readout, and can be configured to run any sequence of single- and two-qubit gates [1]. We combine this setup with different classical optimization routines to implement a so-called hybrid system. Quantum-classical hybrid protocols offer a path towards the application of near-term quantum computers for different optimization tasks. They are attractive since part of the effort is outsourced to a classical machine resulting in shallower and narrower quantum circuits, which can be executed with lower error rates.
We have realized several experimental demonstrations relating to this approach, such as the training of shallow circuits for Generative Modeling using a Bayesian optimization routine [2], tackling the Max-Cut problem using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) [3], and the preparation of thermal quantum states [4].
Recent results, limitations of the above methods, and ideas for boosting these concepts for scaling up the quantum-classical hybrid architecture will be discussed.
[1] S. Debnath et al., Nature 563:63 (2016); [2] D. Zhu et al., Science Advances 5, 10 (2019); [3] O. Shehab et al., arXiv:1906.00476 (2019); [4] D. Zhu et al., arXiv:1906.02699 (2019)