Challenge Statement: An excursio on many-body quantum scars

Background: many-body quantum scars are arguably the first, and only, discovery of new physical phenomena achieved by experimentation with quantum computers to date. In this phenomenon, a many-body quantum system is driven into one state of a degenerate ordered phase and given a sudden “drive kick” – technically known as a quench. This quench onsets a melting of the ordered phase, which then evolves under the influence of quantum mechanics. Organically, and surprisingly, the melted system “refreezes” in another instance of the set of degenerate phases. The process keeps repeating itself – naturally losing coherence.

Challenge goals: In most hackathons, particularly in quantum ones, a big emphasis is given to application development. In this case, the application comes ready for you: you will be playing with quantum scars. The phenomenon still holds mysteries in physics and holds promising application directions as an algorithmic resource to enhance optimization protocols. In this challenge, we want to bring out the experimentalist in you and focus on close interactions with real hardware and data-analysis to extract design directives for performant quantum computing.

Activities

With a total of 7000 shots of quantum compute, you are tasked with:

  • Securing experiments that demonstrate 1 scar revival between 2 ordered phases (one going to the other, no return) while seeking
    • Largest possible number of atoms
    • Largest probability of revival

We expect as deliverables

  • a write up on your experiment showcasing your understanding and analysis of the problem
  • a Bloqade python module to deploy readout error mitigation methodologies on local observables

Optimization directions for your experiment may include: - Lattice choice. - Waveform choice.

  • Readout error mitigation strategies.

And to keep things exciting, remember: we want to bring out the experimentalist in you! The prize goes to the best experimental demonstration, so creativity counts! Even if large systems with high probability are the target, showing scars in novel geometries, implementing new protocols for data analysis, or other novel approaches to the phenomenon analysis will count towards your chance for victory!

References

  1. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abg2530
  2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24622
  3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.03528.pdf
  4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14044.pdf
  5. https://mitiq.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guide/rem-5-theory.html

Read Me

Here you will learn all the details needed to operate QuEra resources for YQuantum 2024.

For basic materials on Bloqade and Aquila usage, consult QuEra's educational platform.

Installing Bloqade and other packages

Bloqade, QuEra's neutral atom emulator and SDK, is going to be the key software you will operate for this challenge. Bloqade has both Julia-based and Python-based versions and we suggest focusing on the latter here.

For this event, you will need to operate it from inside qBraid's platform, but if you want to run emulations by yourself, you can easily install Bloqade locally via pip install bloqade.

Guidelines for the Julia version can also be found here.

Working on qBraid

While simulations and emulations of your program can be done locally on your computer, operation of QuEra's systems for this event will mandatorily go via qBraid (where you can also do the emulations, if you want).

To access the service, simply sign up at qBraid's website and use the promo code QUERA_QBRAID_YALE to get your credits for the event.

For other questions or additional help using qBraid, see Lab User Guide, or reach out on Discord.

Quantum resources availability and code of conduct

To guarantee fair sharing of resources among teams, here are the guidelines for usage of QuEra's quantum computing resources during the hackaton:

  • Tasks are to be limited to 500 repetition shots.
  • Hybrid optimization jobs will not be allowed.
  • Aquila will be continuously available to participants but will break for one hour for calibration on Sunday 7a.m.

Documentation

This year’s YQuantum challenges require a write-up/documentation portion that is heavily considered during judging. The write-up is a chance for you to be creative in describing your approach and describing your process. It should clearly explain the problem, the approach you used, your implementation with results from simulation and hardware, and how you accessed the quantum hardware (total number of shots used, backends used, etc.).

Submission

To submit the challenge, place all of your materials - code you wrote, presentation documents, Bloqade module - on your DoraHacks repo! Consult DoraHacks' team for directions!