My PhD student Siyuan NIU has successfully defended her dissertation titled “Circuit Compilation and Error Mitigation for Near-term Quantum Computing.” This is a huge achievement despite all the pandemic challenges. Many congratulations to Siyuan on this excellent accomplishment, and it was a pleasure to supervise and work with her on this exciting research topic.

The members of the jury were:

Isabelle Philip                         Directrice de Recherche, Université de Montpellier    Examinateur

Aida Todri-Sanial                    Directrice de Recherche, Université de Montpellier    Directrice de thèse

Carmen García Almudéver   Professeur, Université polytechnique de Valence        Rapporteur

Robert Wille                           Professeur, Université technique de Munich                 Rapporteur

Eric Bourreau                         Professeur, Université de Montpellier                             Examinateur

Gilles Burel                             Professeur, Université Bretagne Occidentale                 Examinateur

Gonzalaz-Zalba Fernando    Lecturer, Université de Cambridge                                  Invited

Jean-Michel Torres                IBM Quantum                                                                     Invited

Abstract:

Quantum computing promises to address classically intractable problems. It has been rapidly growing in recent years, and several quantum platforms based on different technologies have been proposed, either from academia or industry. Quantum algorithms have also been developed to outperform their classical counterparts in theory. Despite the progress, today’s quantum hardware is still sensitive to noise and difficult to control, which prevents the demonstration of quantum advantage on near-term quantum computers. There is a gap between the resources needed for quantum algorithms and the noisy hardware implementations. This dissertation aims at closing this gap with the help of hardware-software co-design, focusing on circuit compilation and error mitigation. In particular, this dissertation investigates (1) qubit mapping problem to compile a circuit on the near-term quantum hardware considering the hardware constraints. (2) multi-programming mechanism to improve the near-term quantum hardware utilization. (3) cross-platform benchmarking to evaluate the multi-programming technique on different quantum platforms. (4) dynamical decoupling to reduce the decoherence error and crosstalk. The dissertation is concluded by discussing the future research directions to enable quantum applications on near-term quantum hardware.