Promotie

Applications of topology to Weyl semimetals and quantum computing

• Tom O'Brien

Datum

donderdag 20 juni 2019

Tijd

15:00 - 15:45 uur

Locatie

Academiegebouw
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

Samenvatting

Topology is the study of large, emergent features of a system that cannot be seen at the microscopic level. In this thesis, we study how these features emerge, and may be used, in two different areas of physics. In exotic crystals, namely Weyl semimetals and superconducting nanowires, topology predicts the emergence of Weyl and Majorana fermions respectively. The former has various bizarre responses to an external magnetic field, two of which we study in this work. The latter promises a noise-resilient platform for quantum computing, which we develop algorithms to study quantum chemistry with in this work. This theme of using topology to prevent errors during quantum computation is not confined just to Majorana fermions. In the surface and color codes, topology guarantees macroscopic degrees of freedom that may be used to encode quantum information. This quantum error correction requires decoding of repeated parity checks to trap and fix local errors before they expand to the size of the encoded information. We develop, improve, and benchmark various decoding strategies in this work. The quantum computer itself promises the ability to perform specific calculations intractable on traditional computers. We finally in this work study the workhorse of these calculations, quantum phase estimation, developing and benchmarking new schemes for its application.

Promotoren

• Prof.dr. C.W.J.  Beenakker
• Prof.dr. L. DiCarlo (Delft)
• Prof.dr. I. Adagideli (Sabanci Univeristy)

Bijwonen

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Persvragen

Maarten Muns, adviseur wetenschapscommunicatie Universiteit Leiden
[e-mail]
071 527 3282