Through the Partnership Seed Award (PSA), The Center for Quantum Information and Engineering (CQISE) has awarded $30,000 to faculty and researchers at Ohio State and their external partnering organizations. The PSA was created to support new partnerships between the university’s faculty/researchers and external researchers with the objective to connect Ohio State and regional partners through small, collaborative projects. This award aligns with CQISE’s goals to help coordinate and facilitate academic-industry connections to support the development of a ‘quantum economy’ as well as establish Ohio State University as a regional hub for QISE. In the fall of 2022 proposals were submitted and after committee review, three were selected to receive $10,000 each.
Several assistant and internship opportunities were created and filled with highly qualified undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students through PSA funds. Some awardees will engage in site visits to stoke cross-collaboration among the university and its outside partners, continuing to bring together and strengthen a multidisciplinary community of researchers across the university and throughout the region as well as beginning to build the foundation for more substantial future awards, such as the DAGSI Fellowship award and the NSF Connections in Quantum Information Science (CQIS) program. Dr. Martin Kong, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at OSU shared, “The project is funding a senior undergraduate research assistant at OSU, who will be advised by myself and co-advised by Dr. Lin (BNL), for the Summer and Autumn semesters and aims to extend recent work of Dr. Lin (BNL) to produce control pulses that minimize the effects of noise from the environment.”
Two departments within OSU’s College of Engineering and five partners leading in the QISE field are represented in the selected proposals. “I am truly grateful for this extraordinary opportunity to establish collaboration with Dr. Brian Kirby from ARL on quantum information,” said Zhihul Zhu, PSA recipient and assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at OSU. “Together, we have achieved fruitful collaborative work thus far.” A special thank you to ERIK (The Enterprise for Research Innovation and Knowledge) for supporting this PSA.
Check back soon for initiative outcomes and results. Another request for proposals for the Partnership Seed Award is planned for Fall 2023.
CQISE Initiatives: Partnership Seed Awards 2022 Recipients
Nonconvex Optimization for Efficiently Characterizing Quantum Networks
Lead PI: Zhihul Zhu, College of Engineering; Brian Kirby, US Army Research Laboratory
Project description: This project aims to develop nonconvex optimization theories and efficient algorithms to characterize the correlations within large-scale and complex networks of quantum systems.
Expected outcomes: Development of a new nonconvex optimization test for quantum network topologies.
Compiler-Assisted Physics-Driven Quantum Optimal Control for the 1+1 Field Theory Model
Lead PI: Martin Kong, College of Engineering; Meifeng Lin, Computational Science Initiative of Brookhaven National Laboratory
Project description: To investigate methods for Quantum Optimal Control (QOC) based on gate infidelity by exploring and leveraging complier auto tuning techniques to distinguish strongly interacting qubits from weaker ones.
Expected outcomes: Decoupling qubit clusters with varying levels of mutual dependences, and modeling qubit interactions as intra-cluster and inter-cluster.
Discrete Optimization Aimed to Expand the Utility of Current Quantum Computers
Lead PI: Chen Chen, College of Engineering
Co-PI: David Bernal, Purdue University & NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Co-PI: Merve Bodur, University of Toronto
Project description: This project aims to expand the utility of current quantum computers, enabling their use across a diverse set of problems, as well as deepen theoretical understanding for quantum algorithms and this lays the foundation for future quantum computing.
Expected outcomes: Production of technical reports and full papers that will begin to build the foundational methodological publications that will pave the way to further opportunities involving applications in many domains (e.g., quantum computing for manufacturing) and development of an additional proposal for applications-targeted large-scale collaborations (NSF/DOE/ONR/AFOSR, etc.).