Munich Quantum Software Forum 2024: Talk by Austin Fowler (Google)

Title:
Programming a Quantum Computer using SketchUp

Abstract:
Many papers discussing geometrically constrained quantum computation (eg: superconducting qubits) represent computations using 3D structures. A slice of the structure represents what the 2D computer is doing at that instant of time. Such diagrams are typically created in SketchUp, a simple 3D modeling tool. Many of these structures have never been simulated due to the difficulty of coding up the corresponding low-level circuits, meaning an accurate quantitative assessment of performance is absent. We are working on tools to address this, enabling researchers to work purely in 3D with the aim of devising compact computations and then feed this work into our toolchain to get simulation results.

Biography:
Dr. Austin Fowler received a PhD in quantum computing, specializing in quantum error correction (QEC) in 2005. For the last 10 years he has worked for Google in their QEC team. His main focus these days is supporting open-source community building tools to enable the quantitative study of spacetime compact fault-tolerant quantum computation.