The quantum computers developed over the last 5 years offer computing capacities that are still limited, but that can be optimised. In the paper she will be presenting in Seattle, Zoé Verchère, a doctoral student in the Applied Mathematics Department at ENSTA Paris, supervised by Sourour Elloumi and Andrea Simonetto, proposes to view the design of a quantum computer circuit as a combinatorial optimisation problem, in which the aim is to minimise the depth of the circuit.
This parameter is crucial today, because current quantum computers can only efficiently process short algorithms, with few operations. The depth of the circuit must be optimised, allowing as many operations as possible to be performed in parallel rather than one after the other.
Zoé Verchère's article proposes new ways of designing variational quantum circuits to solve optimisation problems involving multivariate polynomials in binary variables. She focuses in particular on the design of circuits of minimal depth and shows that this problem can be modelled by a linear optimisation problem in discrete variables.
Simplifications allow her to approach the solution of this difficult optimisation problem with solutions that are quick to calculate and that nevertheless lead to a significant gain compared with the state of the art in the field in terms of the depth of quantum circuits.
The paper will be presented at Quantum Week 2023, to be held from 17 to 22 September in Seattle, USA.
