Our Focus

The Center for Quantum Science and Engineering (CQSE) was created in 2018 by the
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Division of Physical Sciences at UCLA
to coordinate research and teaching activities in the emerging field of quantum information science
and technology. CQSE is also developing new approaches to education in this emerging discipline.

Breaking News: UCLA acquires L.A.’s former Westside Pavilion to transform empty mall into the UCLA Research Park

UCLA’s new quantum innovation hub will occupy space at the UCLA Research Park on the site of the former Westside Pavilion shopping mall. California governor Gavin Newsom and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block made the announcement at a visit by Gov. Newsom to the site on Wendesday, January 3. Watch the video of the press conference and see the News section below for further information on this exciting development!

Spotlight

Depth-Optimal Addressing of 2D Qubit Array with 1D Controls

Reducing control complexity is essential for achieving large-scale quantum computing. Inspired by the success of the neutral atom array architectures, we have proposed a conceptual general architecture where a 2D array of qubits are controlled by the product of 1D controls. Such an architecture will be especially beneficial for quantum computing platforms that require extensive cooling, as in the case of superconducting qubit technology, where wiring each qubit to a room-temperature control would surpass the thermal budget for the foreseeable future.

While quadratically reducing controls, this architecture may necessitate higher circuit depths to implement quantum programs because it only allows addressing qubits on the intersections of a set of rows and columns at each time. We formulate the problem of depth-optimal addressing of 2D qubit arrays with 1D-product controls as finding an exact binary matrix factorization (EBMF). We then introduce a satisfiability modulo theories-based optimal solver for EBMF, and a highly efficient heuristic, named row packing, whose performance is very close to the optimal solver on various benchmarks. Furthermore, we discuss the addressing problem in the context of fault-tolerant quantum computing, leveraging a natural logical-physical two-level structure. This work, by graduate students Daniel Bochen Tan and Shuohao Ping led by Prof. Jason Cong from the Computer Science Department, will be presented in the Design and Test in Europe (DATE'2024) during March 25 - 27, 2024. Click on the link below to access the arxiv article.

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Latest News

UCLA announces new Quantum Innovation Hub located in the new UCLA Research Park

UCLA’s new quantum innovation hub will occupy space at the UCLA Research Park on the site of the former Westside Pavilion shopping mall with an eye toward producing major advances in computing, communications, sensing and other areas, and training a new workforce for the burgeoning field. Directed by UCLA’s Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, which is operated jointly by the UCLA College’s Division of Physical Sciences and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, the new enterprise will bring together faculty members and researchers from UCLA and other institutions, government and industry partners, leading startups, and students in a collective, multidisciplinary effort to advance the state of the science.

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CQSE Faculty Member Receives Moore Foundation Award

Congratulations to Professor Wes Campbell, for his naming by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the first cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded grants to support sixteen U.S. experimental physicists. Each investigator will receive $1,250,000 over the next five years to advance the scientific frontier in experimental physics. These awards provide an opportunity for outstanding scientists to pursue transformative research during a critical time in their careers directly following attainment of tenure. This funding allows physicists, during some of their most creative years, to concentrate on their research and build collaborative relationships that enable innovative discoveries.

Dr. Campbell’s research team is designing a new class of molecules that will retain the ability to repeatedly scatter light without becoming vibrationally excited, and thus reach the ultracold regime needed for quantum-enhanced applications. This may allow the design of advanced molecular sensors, precision searches for new physics, or even the construction of quantum processors using chemical assembly.

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CQSE professor among UCLA’s 2023 Guggenheim Fellows

Prineha Narang, UCLA’s Howard Reiss Professor of Physical Sciences and a member of the CQSE, is among the 171 Guggenheim Fellows for 2023. Presented annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships recognize the recipients’ prior achievements and exceptional promise. The grants, which vary in amount, are intended to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”

Narang’s research aims to better understand the dynamics of nonequilibrium states in nature. The physical world — from gas giants in the solar system to living organisms, and even particles — exists in a state of nonequilibrium, making her studies essential to understanding how complex physical events unfold. Congratulations, Pri!

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HRL Laboratories and UCLA Researcher Awarded Grant to Advance Quantum Computing

HRL Laboratories, LLC has won a grant from the Army Research Office to bring spin qubits, one of the most promising next generation qubits, to a working multi-qubit array in partnership with UCLA. The project – Universal Control of Scaled Spin Systems (UCS3) – will allow the team to explore new realms of physics and engineering that emerge in large-scale quantum devices. The UCS3 grant is led by Jason Petta, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, and is a collaboration with HRL Laboratories in Malibu, where the chips will be fabricated and where Petta holds a position as research center director. The team is attempting to embed cutting-edge quantum science technology onto silicon chips where they use the electron’s spin to encode, process, and store information.

UCS3 builds on a history of innovation in quantum computing. As a professor at Princeton University and UCLA, Jason Petta has been a national leader in the earliest prototypes of semiconductor qubits while simultaneously driving qubit quality through over a decade of seminal research. Over the same time period, HRL Laboratories has been developing critical recipes for silicon qubit fabrication and control as well as pioneering the type of silicon structure which will form a foundation for the chips to be developed in this grant.

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NSF Funds CQSE Computer Scientists for Work on Efficient Compilation of Dynamically Reconfigurable Atom Arrays

Neutral atoms trapped in arrays of optical tweezers have recently emerged as an exceptionally promising experimental platform for programmable quantum simulations and quantum computation. These systems are readily scaled to large numbers and demonstrated experimentally that the qubit coupling for entanglement can be reconfigured dynamically during the quantum computation process, thus, are named dynamically reconfigurable atom arrays (DRAAs). DRAA introduces a number of unique opportunities. In particular, it supports a cache-compute computation model, where temporary data can be “cached” in a specific atom array for later computation, mimicking the architecture of modern CPUs. Moreover, algorithms involving error-corrected logical qubits can be implemented very efficiently, with the number of controls that scales with a number of logical (rather than physical) qubits. However, to take full advantage of this unique architecture, novel methods for compilation need to be developed, as programming a DRAA involves not only qubit placement and gate scheduling, but also atom movement.

This project aims at developing a novel DRAA-Compiler that simultaneously considers the problems of qubit placement, gate scheduling, atom movement, and selected error correction under a common compilation framework. In particular, it addresses four interrelated problems, including (i) Scalable compilation for DRAA; (ii) Efficient support of the cache-based DRAA architecture; (iii) Customized support for hardware-efficient error correction on DRAAs ; and (iv) Selective error correction under resource constraints. The algorithms and compilation flow will be tested experimentally on the DRAA quantum computer developed at Harvard University. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration effort by a team of researchers from the UCLA Computer Science Department led by Prof. Jason Cong and the Harvard Physics Department.

Paul Weiss named National Academy of Inventors fellow

CQSE member Paul Weiss, a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and materials science and engineering, has been elected as fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). A prolific scientist and inventor, Weiss holds more than 40 U.S. and international patents and has been an author on more than 500 publications. He is a fellow of IEEE, AIMBE, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Vacuum Society and the Materials Research Society. He joined UCLA in 2009 from Pennsylvania State University, where he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics. He is a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. Weiss also hold faculty appointments in bioengineering and they are members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, where Weiss served as director from 2009 to 2014.

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Events

CQSE Seminar Series

The CQSE Seminar series has resumed for 2023-24 academic year. See below to see our previous speakers and the upcoming schedule.

November 1: Lincoln Carr, Colorado School of Mines

Entangled quantum cellular automata, physical complexity, and Goldilocks rules

November 9: Xiaodi Wu, University of Maryland

Hamiltonian-oriented Quantum Algorithm Design and Programming

November 13: Charlie Tahan, OSTP/LPS

Disrupting Qubits at the LPS Qubit Collaboratory

November 14: Russel Stutz, Quantinuum

Advancing Trapped Ion Quantum Computers

January TBA: Andreas Heinrich, Center for Quantum Nanoscience (South Korea)

Contact us

Winter School on Quantum Information Science for Chemistry

February 20-23, 2024

Jointly sponsored by the Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation (CIQC), the Advanced Molecular Architectures for Quantum Information Science (AMAQIS), and IPAM, we are pleased to present the fourth annual Winter School in Quantum Information Science. This year’s school will turn its focus to Quantum Information Science for Chemistry and will provide both in-depth primers and surveys of current areas of active research in atomic, molecular, and materials systems for quantum information science applications, as well as quantum algorithms alongside methods of “usual” quantum chemistry. Topics to be included in this winter school include:

Introduction to Quantum Information

Classical Quantum Chemistry and QIS applications

Optical Cycling Centers and Precision Measurement

Quantum Algorithms for Chemistry

Molecular qubits

The school is aimed at early career participants, including graduate students, experimentalists, computational scientists, and theorists working in quantum information science and related disciplines. We aim to convene a multidisciplinary group of students and researchers who will disseminate and accelerate developments in the field, and to draw on their own research to help inspire new approaches and application domains. Applications are now being accepted. Financial support will be offered to young researchers subject to demonstrated need and availability. For more information, follow the link below.

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Quantum Computing Student Association

Welcome to the QCSA!

The Quantum Computing Student Association (QCSA) at UCLA is a combined undergraduate and graduate student group under the CQSE focused on everything under the umbrella of quantum information science, including quantum computers, sensors, and algorithms.

We host regular talks by professors and industry professionals working on quantum computing with a variety of different hardwares, such as superconducting qubits, trapped ions, and quantum dots, as well as in the fields of quantum programming and quantum information. We also organize a journal club, social events, and various other career building events focused on quantum information science.

We welcome students of all levels who are interested in quantum computing, and try to make our events as accessible as possible! We have weekly/bi-weekly events during each quarter. For more information and to join the QCSA follow the link below.

Photo at right: Dr. Murphy Niu from Google Quantum AI delivers a QCSA seminar to a packed house

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CQSE Leadership

Prof. Kang Wang

Director (Engineering)
Topological qubits

Prof. Eric Hudson

Co-director (Physics)
Ion qubits

Prof. Mark Gyure

Executive Director
Silicon qubits

Dr. Richard Ross

Education Director
Silicon qubits