Simon Benjamin
Professor of Quantum Technologies
+44 1865 273732
New technologies that exploit quantum physics: quantum sensors, quantum communications, and quantum computing. Theory to support the developement of these technologies on various platforms, including novel silicon and diamond based materials.
Group website: QTechTheory.org
Recent Publications
-
Mitigating Coherent Noise Using Pauli Conjugation
December 2020|Journal article|npj Quantum Information -
QuESTlink—Mathematica embiggened by a hardware-optimised quantum emulator
July 2020|Journal article|Quantum Science and Technology -
Variational quantum simulation of general processes
June 2020|Journal article|Physical Review Letters -
The prospects of quantum computing in computational molecular biology
May 2020|Journal article|Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Molecular Science -
Investigating the potential for a limited quantum speedup on protein lattice problems
April 2020|Journal articleProtein folding, the determination of the lowest-energy configuration of a protein, is an unsolved computational problem. If protein folding could be solved, it would lead to significant advances in molecular biology, and technological development in areas such as drug discovery and catalyst design. As a hard combinatorial optimisation problem, protein folding has been studied as a potential target problem for adiabatic quantum computing. Although several experimental implementations have been discussed in the literature, the computational scaling of these approaches has not been elucidated. In this article, we present a numerical study of the (stoquastic) adiabatic quantum algorithm applied to protein lattice folding. Using exact numerical modelling of small systems, we find that the time-to-solution metric scales exponentially with peptide length, even for small peptides. However, comparison with classical heuristics for optimisation indicates a potential limited quantum speedup. Overall, our results suggest that quantum algorithms may well offer improvements for problems in the protein folding and structure prediction realm.quant-ph, quant-ph, q-bio.BM -
Quantum computational chemistry
March 2020|Journal article|Reviews of Modern Physics -
A Silicon Surface Code Architecture Resilient Against Leakage Errors
December 2019|Journal article|QUANTUM -
Fault-tolerant protection of near-term trapped-ion topological qubits under realistic noise sources
December 2019|Journal article|PHYSICAL REVIEW A -
High-Threshold Code for Modular Hardware With Asymmetric Noise
December 2019|Journal article|PHYSICAL REVIEW APPLIED -
Theory of variational quantum simulation
September 2019|Journal article|Quantum