Quantum information and quantum engineering

Clinton A. Boye

A. R. Piña, Shams El-Adawy, Mike Verostek +8 more

Quantum information science and engineering (QISE) is rapidly gaining interest from those within many disciplines, and higher education needs to adapt to the changing landscape. Although QISE education still has a strong presence and roots in physics, the field is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. There is a need to understand the presence of QISE instruction and quantum-related instruction across all disciplines in order to figure out where QISE education is already happening and where it could be expanded. Although there is recent work that characterizes introductory QISE courses, there is no holistic picture of the landscape of QISE and quantum-related education in the United States. To understand how QISE education is evolving, we analyzed course catalogs from 1456 U.S. institutions. We found 61 institutions offering QISE degree programs, mostly at Ph.D.-granting schools, with interdisciplinary programs being the most common. Physics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science are the primary contributors to these programs. Across all institutions, we identified over 8000 courses mentioning “quantum,” mainly in physics and chemistry departments, but about one-third of institutions in our study had none. We also found over 500 dedicated QISE courses, concentrated in Ph.D.-granting institutions, primarily in physics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Physics leads in offering both general quantum-related courses ( ∼ 4700 ) and QISE-specific courses ( ∼ 200 ). While quantum knowledge is often a prerequisite for QISE, there are efforts to make QISE education more accessible to students with less background in quantum mechanics. Across multiple disciplines, we also see that QISE topics are being introduced in courses not fully dedicated to QISE, which may be a productive strategy for increasing students’ access to QISE education. Our dataset and analysis provide the most comprehensive overview to date of quantum education across U.S. higher education. Additionally, this work is the first to address, in detail, the landscape of quantum content in two-year and community colleges and examines the largest set of MSIs in this context. We hope these findings will support and guide future efforts in curriculum design, workforce development, and education policy across the quantum ecosystem.

David Peter Divincenzo

康弘 都倉

Noufal Jaseem, Victor Mukherjee

We study a quantum information engine (QIE) modeled by a multiqubit working medium (WM) collectively coupled to a single thermal bath. We show that one can harness the collective effects to significantly enhance the performance of the QIE, as compared to equivalent engines lacking collective effects. We use one bit of information about the WM magnetization to extract work from the thermal bath. We analyze the work output, noise-to-signal ratio, and thermodynamic uncertainty relation (TUR), and contrast these performance metrics of a collective QIE with that of an engine whose WM qubits are coupled independently to a thermal bath. We show that in the limit of high temperatures of the thermal bath, a collective QIE always outperforms its independent counterpart. In contrast to quantum heat engines, where collective enhancement in specific heat plays a direct role in improving the performance of the engines, here the collective advantage stems from higher occupation probabilities for the higher-energy levels of the positive magnetization states, as compared to the independent case. Furthermore, we show that in the limit of high temperatures, the TUR for both the collective as well as the independent QIEs violate the standard heat engine TUR bound of 2.

Jung Jun Park, Kang-Hwan Kim, Takahiro Sagawa +1 more

The key question of this Letter is whether work can be extracted from a heat engine by using purely quantum mechanical information. If the answer is yes, what is its mathematical formula? First, by using a bipartite memory we show that the work extractable from a heat engine is bounded not only by the free energy change and the sum of the entropy change of an individual memory but also by the change of quantum mutual information contained inside the memory. We then find that the engine can be driven by purely quantum information, expressed as the so-called quantum discord, forming a part of the quantum mutual information. To confirm it, as a physical example we present the Szilard engine containing a diatomic molecule with a semipermeable wall.