A fully fault-tolerant quantum computer that can be used for solving important problems such as factoring and database search requires millions of qubits with low error rates. The design of such powerful error-corrected quantum computers will require sustained effort in the field for a very long time, making the possibility of a “quantum winter” a real concern. This has sparked an innovative drive to design algorithms for NISQ devices to perform classically challenging tasks. In this talk, I will examine how one can maximally make use of NISQ devices from two different operational point-of-views: top-down and bottom-up approaches. In the first part (top-down approach) of my talk, I will talk about the recent work I have done to simulate and verify quantum advantage experiments of superconducting circuit experiments and quantum optics ones in light of the recent quantum advantage experiments carried out by Google quantum AI and Prof. Jian-Wei Pan's group. From these proposals, I will argue that one of the killer apps of near-term quantum computing is to simulate the quantum computer itself. The second topic that I will discuss is a bottom-up approach where I will show a qubit (two-level system, a fundamental building block of a quantum processor) can have built-in error protection and robustness already in the quantum hardware level. This suggests that one of the pathways to scale up a quantum computer is to use such an approach rather than using commonly used qubits such as transmons which are error-prone. Finally, I will conclude by discussing open problems in both fields and argue that recent advances in bosonic encoding schemes, myself and collaborators have developed, will continue to push the quantum computing/simulation frontiers and beyond. 
 

Dr. Thi Ha Kyaw is a recipient of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Trieste TRIL fellowship and Niels Bohr Institute fellowship. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik’s Matter Lab, the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. thesis titled "Towards large-scale quantum computing platform in ultrastrong coupling regime" was named best of the best by Springer in 2019, and one of the best New Quantum Computing Books To Read In 2021 by BookAuthority.org. His research interest includes quantum computing, quantum simulation, open quantum systems, ultrastrong light-matter interaction, quantum controlled dynamics, and the interface between machine learning and quantum computing.