Post by Yiyi Cai

Analog quantum computers hold great potential for solving classically intractable problems in many-body physics on near-term quantum devices. However, the presence of noise places significant limitations on what analog quantum computers can achieve, and their theoretical guarantees are largely unexplored. Working with my amazing mentors Yu Tong and John Preskill during my 2023 summer undergraduate research fellowship at Caltech, we showed that the error accumulations in the analog setting are milder than one would naively expect due to stochastic error cancellations. Specifically, we considered the error on observable expectation values and fidelity decay and obtain quadratically improved bounds. I presented our work at the 2024 Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC) Conference earlier this September at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Okinawa, Japan, and I am honored to have received an Outstanding Paper Prize at the conference! Many thanks to my collaborators and colleagues at Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (most of whom are featured below!) for their thoughtful discussions and for making the summer both productive and enjoyable! If you are interested, feel free to check out our paper at https://lnkd.in/gcudy7CQ and my talk at https://lnkd.in/gGeMbJ7k!