A recent report of the United States Department of Energy “Quantum for Fusion, Fusion for Quantum” has highlighted several opportunities for scientific discovery and technology advances at the interface of quantum computing and quantum technologies with fusion and plasma physics.

With the goal of fostering and promoting the dialogue across these two areas and to promote the interdisciplinary interaction between the researchers working in these fields, the Group of Lasers and Plasmas at IPFN, and the Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group at PQI and IT will host a series of monthly discussion sessions on Quantum for Plasmas & Plasmas for Quantum.

Everyone is welcome to attend. The discussion session will run, typically, once per month, and will be hosted by Akshat Kumar and Marija Vranic starting in 2022, following the inaugural hosting by Yasser Omar and Luis O. Silva in 2020-2021.

Winter 2022

28 January 2022 4.00 pm (WET)
Andrew Baczewski, Sandia National Laboratories
Prospects for simulating warm dense matter on quantum computers

Abstract: Warm dense matter is typified by the coexistence of electron degeneracy and thermal effects. The quantum nature of the constituent electrons requires that their dynamics obey the Schroedinger equation, the solution of which suffers from a notorious curse of dimensionality. The cost of curing this curse on classical computers is a dilemma – the choice between accuracy and efficiency. But quantum computers promise to enable us to have both accuracy and efficiency. In this talk, I will describe the prospects for realizing this in the context of simulating warm dense matter. First, I will motivate the need for quantum simulation with a discussion of the state of the art in simulation on classical computers. Then, I will describe work that our group has done to improve the efficiency of simulation algorithms in the NISQ era. Finally, I will provide estimates for what it will take to realize significant advantages beyond the NISQ era, and point to important open problems specific to warm dense matter.

25 February 2022 4.00 pm (WET)
George Vahala, William & Mary
Qubit Lattice Algorithm for the Electromagnetic Pulse Propagation in Scalar Dielectric Media

Abstract: There is much interest in examining plasma problems that will be amenable to error-correcting quantum computers. For some years, we have been developing Qubit Lattice Algorithms (QLA) for the solution of nonlinear physics – in particular the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation (NLS)/Gross Pitaevskii equation in 1D-2D-3D. The 1D soliton physics benchmarked our algorithms, while in 3D we examined scalar quantum turbulence, finding 3 energy cascades on a 5760³ grid using 11k processors (2009). For spinor BEC simulations the QLA were ideally parallelized on classical supercomputers (tested to over 760k cores on IBM Mira). QLA is a mesoscopic representation of interleaved non-commuting sequence of collision/streaming operators which in the continuum limit perturbatively reproduce the physics equations of interest. The collision operators entangle the local on-site qubits, while the streaming operators spread this entanglement throughout the lattice. For plasma physics we are developing QLA for Maxwell equations in a dielectric medium. The QLA collision operators were readily determined following the connection of Maxwell equations in a vacuum to the free particle Dirac equation. Even for 1D propagation of an electromagnetic pulse normal to a dielectric interface we find interesting results: our QLA simulations reproduces all the standard Fresnel relations for a plane wave, except that the transmission amplitude is augmented by a factor (n₂ /n₁ )¹/² over the Fresnel plane wave result. We will discuss our recent QLA results of scattering of a 1D electromagnetic pulse from a 2D scalar dielectric cylinder. For sharp dielectric boundary layers, and small pulse widths one finds multiple reflections within the dielectric cylinder leading to re-radiation of fields from the dielectric region and quite complex field structures.

Spring 2021

26 March 2021 2.00pm
Andrew Childs, University of Maryland
Efficient quantum algorithm for dissipative nonlinear differential equations

28 May 2021 5.00pm
Yuhan Shi, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Using quantum computers to simulate a toy problem of laser-plasma interactions

2 July 2021 3.00pm
Óscar Amaro, GoLP/IPFN/IST
Towards quantum simulation of extreme plasmas

23 July 2021 5.00pm
Ilon Joseph, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Quantum Simulation of Nonlinear Classical and Semiclassical Dynamics

Fall 2020

30 October 2020 1.30pm
Delbert Murphy, Microsoft
A Full-Stack Approach to Quantum Computing

27 November 2020 1.30pm
Marija Vranic, GoLP/IPFN/IST
Plasma physics behind the first works on quantum algorithms applied in plasmas

18 December 2020 1.30pm
Ilya Dodin, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University
Does quantum computing look promising for plasma simulations?

29 January 2021 5.00pm
Alexander Engel, University of Colorado Boulder
Developing efficient quantum algorithms for classical plasma simulation

Spring 2020

27 March 2020 2.00pm
Nuno Loureiro, MIT
Quantum computing for plasma dynamics

30 April 2020 6.00pm
Yasser Omar, DM/IST & IT
A brief introduction to Quantum Computation and Quantum Simulation

29 May 2020 4.30pm
Ricardo Fonseca, ISCTE-IUL & GoLP/IPFN/IST
Plasma simulations on classical computers

26 June 2020 4.30pm
Duarte Magano, IST & IT
Introduction to Quantum Algorithms