Report of the 12th QSC General Assembly in Leiden.
On Friday the 15th of November, the 12th QSC General Assembly was held in Leiden at the unique Scheltema venue. The Scheltema building, which served as a blanket factory in the 19th century, provided an industrial atmosphere for what proved to be an interesting day of talks and collaboration between the different QSC branches.
The QSC assembly was attended by researchers working on a broad variety of topics related to quantum computing and this variety of research interests resulted in a well-balanced set of talks, with topics ranging from abstract theoretical quantum algorithms to more applied experimental work. After the reception with tea and coffee and a welcome by Ronald de Wolf, the presentations were kicked off by Pedro Capitão, who is working at CWI. In his talk, Pedro introduced us to the field of secure (multiparty) computation. Amongst other applications, the introduced techniques could play a role in situations where a computation is delegated to an untrusted cluster, which should be able to perform the computation without explicitly getting access to the raw information.
This talk was followed by a plentiful lunch, which provided some time for mingling and relaxation before the start of the afternoon program. After the lunchbreak, the floor was taken over by researchers from Leiden University. First, Jan Krzywda discussed his work related to noise in spin-qubits. In his presentation filled with humor and (unfortunately) fictitious conversations with prominent researchers from the storied past of Leiden University, Jan showed how learning methods can be used to estimate fluctuations in spinqubits.
Followings Jan's talk, Kshiti Sneh Rai presented new methods related to adiabatic state preparation of tensor network states, where an important goal was to find the optimal path from a trivial initial Hamiltonian to the desired Hamiltonian for specific types of tensor network states. After another break, Jonas Haferkamp from Harvard University delivered the final presentation. Jonas talked about applications of random quantum circuits and showed how they can be constructed efficiently using smart algorithms. The coming together of researchers from different institutes always provides an interesting mix of topics and broadens the views of the participants and this QSC assembly was no exception. Of course, the successful day was concluded with some well-deserved drinks and snacks.