scientist Develop Algorithms to Increase the Speed of Quantum Computers

Quantum Computers have the potential to solve important problems that are beyond reach even for the most powerful supercomputers, but they require new type of programming and creating algorithms. Universities and major tech companies are spearheading research on how to develop these new algorithms.

In a recent collaboration between University of Helsinki, Aalto University, University of Turku, and IBM Research Europe-Zurich, a team of researchers have developed a new method to speed up calculations on Quantum Computers. The results are published in the journal PRX Quantum of the American Physical Society.Guillermo García-Pérez, researcher from Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki said that unlike classical computers, which use bits to store ones and zeros, information is stored in the qubits of a quantum processor in the form of a quantum state, or a wave function. Special procedures are thus required to read out data from Quantum Computers.

Quantum algorithms also require a set of inputs, provided for example as real numbers, and a list of operations to be performed on some reference initial state.The problem with this is the large number of measurements required for many popular applications of Quantum Computers.The number of calculations required is known to grow very quickly with the size of the system one wants to simulate, even if only partial information is needed. This makes the process hard to scale up, slowing down the computation and consuming a lot of computational resources.

The method proposed by García-Pérez and co-authors uses a generalized class of quantum measurements that are adapted throughout the calculation in order to extract the information stored in the quantum state efficiently. This reduces the number of iterations, and therefore the time and computational cost, needed to obtain high-precision simulations.