Quantum Computing Applications and the Measurement Problem

Abstract

With digital quantum computers reaching the scale of ~100 qubits and ever-increasing gate fidelities and coherence times, potential applications of quantum computing can now be explored on noisy hardware. This talk gives an overview of such applications with a particular focus on algorithms for quantum chemistry. On noisy hardware, i.e., before fault-tolerance, the depth of quantum circuits remains limited. Quantum algorithms research thus aims to reduce the circuit depth or apply error mitigation techniques. This typically comes at the cost of a high number of individual circuit executions. As applications scale up to relevant problem sizes, these shot number requirements pose significant challenges. We present various approaches on how to deal with this “measurement problem”.