£3m EPSRC grant to make Quantum Computing more robust

DoC researcher part of a team who will collaborate to deliver quantum computing that is robust and reliable.

Achieving reliable quantum computation faces unique challenges—not least the fragility of quantum systems due to their interactions with their environment and the fact that the state of the system during a computation cannot be measured to confirm its correctness. The very feature that makes quantum computation powerful, the exponential size of the space of states in the number of qubits, makes it hard to emulate and hence assess behaviour. 

“This is an unusual and exciting opportunity to reach out to, establish, expand and seed the network of UK computer systems and software researchers to exploit the capabilities of quantum computing—and to bridge the gap to deliver quantum-accelerated applications to realise new computational capability across diverse application domains.”  Paul Kelly Professor of Software Technology, Imperial College London

This initiative, funded by a £3m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which includes the Department of Computing’s Professor Paul Kelly will establish a vibrant and truly cross-disciplinary community of researchers in quantum computing and computer science, who will collaborate to address the global challenge of delivering quantum computing that is robust, reliable, and trustworthy. With the substantial recent progress internationally in building ever larger quantum computers, verifying that they do indeed perform the tasks they were designed for has become a central unsolved problem in the field. 

This project will bring quantum computation research into close contact with the scientific tools, methods and (especially) mindsets of the ICT research community—across a broad spread of the key classical computing stacks. Together, they will define the beginnings of a general framework and advance specific solutions for reliable and robust quantum computation, at key layers across the principal quantum computing stacks needed to achieve reliable quantum computing systems. 

Over the first year, the project directors will invite engagement from across the UK’s scientific community to co-create a portfolio of funded, cross-disciplinary projects that address this ambitious goal. A series of scoping workshops will be convened to propose and discuss technical directions and to facilitate the formation of project investigator teams. Projects selected for funding will commence from April 2023.