Twenty-one students got hands-on experience working with the Lab's quantum computing experts and the opportunity to program on actual quantum computers, a unique opportunity for them to work on cutting-edge research and for the Lab to build a pipeline to advance the mission.
In existence since 2018, the Quantum Computing Summer School attracts students from around the world with diverse academic backgrounds, including physics, chemistry, computer science and applied mathematics. The summer school is one of the world’s top quantum computing internships available to undergraduate and graduate students. Applications to the 10-week, research-intensive program reached an all-time high of nearly 700 this year, though only 21 students can be accepted.
School co-lead Marco Cerezo said many students discover that Los Alamos is a great place to do quantum science, and they want to stay longer after the summer program ends. Some extend their fellowships to continue their research, while others return as graduate research assistants or postdoctoral researchers. Still others land long-term positions at the Lab.
“Deep expertise in quantum science will be essential for advancing national security, material science and other critical aspects of our mission. The school is a great way to grow our effort, build expertise and attract future workforce,” said school co-lead Lukasz Cincio, a physicist who won IBM’s quantum coding challenge in 2020.
The Quantum Computing Summer School is supported by the Lab’s Information Science and Technology Institute and Theoretical division.
Quantum explained
Fundamentally different from classical computers, quantum processors use a variety of approaches to process quantum information, including superconducting and quantum photonic circuits as well as trapped ions. They rely on quantum properties of their constituents such as superposition and entanglement.
Quantum computing technology has the potential to solve certain kinds of complex problems faster than classical computers, but its powers and pitfalls are still being studied. At the Lab's summer internship, each student is paired with a mentor who has the expertise to guide them through projects that explore burning questions and help them learn quantum coding.
The summer school's maturation is reflected in the participation this summer of researchers from Xanadu, a Canadian company that is a longtime collaborator with the Lab.
“Researchers from Xanadu extended our mentor pool and allowed us to pursue projects that we would not be able to execute on our own,” Cincio said.
Max West, a student from the University of Melbourne in Australia, worked on two projects with Xanadu mentorship — one concerned with efficiently learning properties of unknown quantum states via “classical shadows” and the other optimizing quantum circuits in the presence of symmetries.
“I think attending the summer school will be extremely helpful career-wise due to the opportunity not only to work on some really cool projects, but also to meet and work with some of the leading people in quantum computing,” West said.
Productive problem-solvers
This summer, students worked on a variety of subjects, including quantum machine learning, quantum error mitigation, applications of quantum computing to material science and high-energy physics, classical simulations of quantum systems, optimization problems and many more. Their Los Alamos mentors were staff scientists and postdoctoral researchers from four divisions.
Summer student Alice Barthe, who is affiliated with the Lab’s Theoretical division and two European institutions, has already finished writing a manuscript that explores a central question: “What are problems that a quantum computer can efficiently solve, but that would be intractable for their classical counterparts?”
Many other projects will finish with a paper, published months out from now.
“The school is very productive. Over the seven years we've been running it, students have published over 40 papers, many of them in high-impact journals. Their work assists many scientific projects at LANL,” Cincio said.
In lectures open to Lab employees, leading researchers from academia and industry discussed their latest work: Miles Stoudenmire (Flatiron Institute), Robert Huang (Caltech), Rolando Somma (Google), Bob Coecke (Oxford, Quantinuum) and Vedran Djunko (Leiden University).
And in an ongoing tradition, the program brought back a former student who has achieved significant success and with whom the Lab continues to collaborate. This time it was Supanut Thanasilp of Chula University, Thailand.
“Attending LANL Quantum Computing Summer School was without a doubt the most valuable experience during my Ph.D. and had a life-changing impact on my academic career path, leading to me securing a faculty position at the top university in my home country,” Thanasilp said.
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