ECE Seminar: Narayanan Rengaswamy
Thursday, September 8, 2022
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Narayanan Rengaswamy
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Arizona
"Error Correction for Quantum Applications"
McClelland 123 | Zoom link
Summary
Quantum technologies are maturing by the day and there is an enormous amount of research and economic activity in this area. Academic groups, startups, and big companies have all demonstrated the building of small quantum systems, specifically quantum computers, that can be controlled and operated. While this is exciting progress, what remains is the engineering challenge of scaling these to large sizes and making them highly reliable. The only scalable approach known to date to such fault-tolerant quantum systems, such as computers, networks, or sensors, is the physical realization of quantum error correction. Just like error correction is used in our mobile phones and hard drives to achieve reliable communications and data storage, the idea of quantum error correction is to add redundancy to the data and use that to detect and fix errors. However, due to the fundamental nature of quantum information, the mathematical and physical methods for implementing this intuition are very different from error correction for classical systems such as mobile phones and hard drives.
In this talk, Rengaswamy will start by introducing the basics of classical error correction and briefly comment on how they are applied to communications and storage. Then he will discuss the fundamentals of quantum information and quantum error correction. Rengaswamy will use examples to help convey these concepts. Finally, he will present how we apply these ideas to different quantum applications such as quantum computing, communications, and networking.
Bio
Narayanan Rengaswamy is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in ECE from Duke University in May 2020 and joined UA ECE as a postdoc with Bane Vasic. For his dissertation, he worked with Henry Pfister and Robert Calderbank on error correction methods for fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum communications. Prior to that, he completed his M.S. in ECE from Texas A&M University and his B.S. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Amrita University, India. He spent the summer of 2015 at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Stuttgart, Germany, as a research intern working on error correction for optical communications with Laurent Schmalen and Vahid Aref. His current research interests are classical and quantum error correction, quantum computing, quantum networking, and quantum communications. He is also part of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Quantum Networks (CQN) at UA.