Seminar

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Speaker

James Freericks
Professor of Physics
Georgetown University

Bio

James Freericks is passionate about showing how near-term quantum computers will advance science. He has been working in areas related to condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry to achieve this goal. Educated at Princeton University (1985) and the University of California, Berkeley (1987,1991), he held postdoctoral fellowships at the ITP in Santa Barbara and at UC Davis before moving to Georgetown University in 1994. He is a fellow of AAAS and APS and has won awards from the Alpha Sigma Nu Society, the Office of Naval Research, edX, and Georgetown University. He is currently Professor and McDevitt Chair at Georgetown University in the Department of Physics.

Abstract

Can the current generation quantum computers solve science problems that conventional computers cannot? The jury is still out on this, but key to achieving this goal is the ability to perform robust quantum computation on near-term hardware. In this talk, I will describe three different types of robust computation that we have successfully completed: (i) computing topological properties (ii) simulating driven-dissipative systems and (iii) performing coherent time evolution with constant depth circuits. I will describe the techniques needed for robust computation, and will show results, such as time evolution with 1000 Trotter steps, running more than an order of magnitude longer than the decoherence time of the machine. I will end with a discussion on how one can directly measure nonequilibrium Green’s functions and how this can usher in a new era in simulations of pump-probe experiments.