We are happy to announce that Darren Banfield and Puya Mirkarimi, two members of the AQC team, have been awarded their PhDs after successfully defending their theses.
Darren’s thesis is concerned with the stability of passive quantum memories, which store the logical states of quantum error correcting codes for long periods of time without active error correction except on read-out. It introduces a framework for considering the action of perturbations using percolation theory, allowing for a deeper analysis of quantum memories.
Puya’s thesis proposes techniques for improving the performance of quantum algorithms when solving highly constrained combinatorial optimisation problems in customer data science. The thesis investigates an alternative method for encoding constraints in Ising Hamiltonians that makes more efficient use of computational resources and introduces a new variant of the quantum approximate optimisation algorithm that improves its ability to solve problems involving constraints.