Clockwise from left: Ben Jaderberg, Abhishek Agarwal and Tom O'Leary
The winners of the second annual IBM Quantum Awards: Open Science Prize were announced earlier this month; Oxford graduate students Tom O’Leary and Benjamin Jaderberg, along with Oxford alumnus Abhishek Agarwal now at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), were named as category winners as well as the overall winners.
The theme for the competition was quantum simulation and as such, competitors were asked to simulate a Heisenberg model Hamiltonian for a three-particle system on the 7-qubit IBM Quantum Jakarta processor. The competition awards the most accurate simulation with participants using one of two methods – Qiskit Pulse or Qiskit Defaults. The winning award went to the team who were able to achieve the highest fidelity simulation of the evolution of a known quantum state using a method called Trotterization. IBM created the challenge to onboard as many interested researchers as possible to the field of quantum simulation.
Professor Dieter Jaksch led the group while the trio were at Oxford: ‘Their winning submission is based on the incremental structural learning (ISL) method which they developed for their projects while at Oxford. Ben’s thesis uses this method extensively and it is great to see that it has wider appeal and application beyond the work done in our group. Congratulations!’