Urmila Mahadev grabs Schrödinger's cat by the tail...
Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem
quantamagazine.org
Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?
The inner state of a quantum computer is generally a superposition of many different non-quantum, “classical” states (like Schrödinger’s cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive). But as soon as you measure a quantum state, it collapses into just one of these classical states. Peer inside a 300-qubit quantum computer, and essentially all you will see is 300 classical bits — zeros and ones — smiling blandly up at you.
“A quantum computer is very powerful, but it’s also very secretive,” Vazirani said.
Given these constraints, computer scientists have long wondered whether it is possible for a quantum computer to provide any ironclad guarantee that it really has done what it claimed. “Is the interaction between the quantum and the classical worlds strong enough so that a dialogue is possible?” asked Dorit Aharonov, a computer scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
During her second year of graduate school, Mahadev became captivated by this problem, for reasons even she doesn’t fully understand. In the years that followed, she tried one approach after another. “I’ve had a lot of moments where I think I’m doing things right, and then they break, either very quickly or after a year,” she said.
But she refused to give up. Mahadev displayed a level of sustained determination that Vazirani has never seen matched. “Urmila is just absolutely extraordinary in this sense,” he said.
Now, after eight years of graduate school, Mahadev has succeeded. She has come up with an interactive protocol by which users with no quantum powers of their own can nevertheless employ cryptography to put a harness on a quantum computer and drive it wherever they want, with the certainty that the quantum computer is following their orders. Mahadev’s approach, Vazirani said, gives the user “leverage that the computer just can’t shake off.”
For a graduate student to achieve such a result as a solo effort is “pretty astounding,” Aaronson said. |
