Quantum Computing and Feynman’s Opportunity

Vicente Moret‐Bonillo

Zoe Gonzalez Izquierdo, Sophie Block, Besart Mujeci +3 more

In the rapidly expanding field of quantum computing, one key aspect to maintain ongoing progress is ensuring that early career scientists interested in the field get appropriate guidance and opportunity to advance their work, and in return that institutions and enterprises with a stake in quantum computing have access to a qualified pool of talent. Internship programs at the graduate level are the perfect vehicle to achieve this. In this paper, we review the trajectory of the USRA Feynman Quantum Academy Internship Program over the last 8 years, placing it in the context of the current push to prepare the quantum workforce of the future, and highlighting the caliber of the work it produced.

Alexander Yu. Vlasov

It is discussed an opportunity to introduce new class of quantum algorithms based on possibility to express amplitude of transition between two states of quantum system as sum of some function along all possible classical paths. Continuous analogue of the property with integral on all possible paths is well known due to Feynman approach and ensures the correspondence with classical minimal action principle. It is less technical and rather popular introduction to earlier work about application of Lagrangian methods in quantum computing [quant-ph/0308017].

Jeff Kabachinski

Ryan Wilkinson

Lance Fortnow

This chapter examines the power of quantum computing, as well as the related concepts of quantum cryptography and teleportation. In 1982, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman noticed there was no simple way of simulating quantum physical systems using digital computers. He turned this problem into an opportunity—perhaps a computational device based on quantum mechanics could solve problems more efficiently than more traditional computers. In the decades that followed, computer scientists and physicists, often working together, showed in theory that quantum computers can solve certain problems, such as factoring numbers, much faster. Whether one can actually build large or even medium-scale working quantum computers and determine exactly what these computers can or cannot do still remain significant challenges.