A team of the LIRMM wins the IBM Quantum Open Science Prize
Distinctions
Computer science
Aida Todri-Sanial and her team from the Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM - CNRS/Université de Montpellier) are part of the winning teams of the IBM Quantum Open Science Prize.
In November 2020, IBM launched the "IBM Quantum Awards: Open Science Prize", a world-wide challenge in which participants were asked to tackle one of two major problems proposed by IBM.
The problems given to the participants have deep implications on the efficiency and reliability of superconducting qubits. The challenge the LIRMM team chose to tackle was about preparing with the highest fidelity possible a specific quantum state, known as "graph-state", that is one of the considered solution for future error correcting code implementation.
After a few weeks spent getting a deeper understanding of the problem, Aida Todri-Sanial and her two PhD students decided to use a two-fold approach: improve the graph-state generation at the gate-level and at the finer pulse-level.
This approach allowed them to split the workload, improve the fidelity on both gate-level and pulse-level and ended up with a check that merging the two improved approaches were not interfering with each other and were indeed improving even more the fidelity of the produced state. Their team, along with three other teams, has been awarded the first prize thanks to their usage of cross-talk aware scheduling algorithm and intelligent dynamical decoupling.