FIrst NEar-TErm ApplicationS of QUAntum Devices

Quantum technologies have set remarkable milestones in the last years, e.g. with quantum advantage experiments and loophole-free Bell tests.

Despite this progress, the quantum devices we currently have, the so-called noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, are too imperfect to run textbook quantum algorithms, yet they hold great potential. With their advent, much research has been devoted to finding them a first practical application.

Focus on optimization, quantum chemistry and machine learning has been intense, and the developments are closely monitored by governments and industry alike. Variational algorithms in a classical-quantum feedback loop and adiabatic algorithms have been the dominant paradigm.

However, important bottle-necks remain that severely maim the performance of NISQ devices and the field yearns for a novel approach.FINE-TEA-SQUAD, FIrst NEar-TErm ApplicationS of QUAntum Devices, proposes a radically new vision: to develop a unifying framework that will yield the first practical applications of NISQ devices.

The main objectives are (A) to design experimentally-friendly protocols for quantum state preparation circumventing major existing bottlenecks (high number of repetitions, noise-induced barren plateaus...) and characterize broad families of states that can be prepared in a scalable way, (B) to develop a practical certification toolset amenable to near-term devices, with especial focus on the generation of certified randomness from a single NISQ device.

The key idea is to use the hardness of many-body physics in a classical verifier-quantum prover interactive protocol.

This approach will overcome the existing limitations of current approaches: it will be both easy to prepare and easy to verify (C) to overcome current hardware scalability limitations by combining several NISQ nodes into a small quantum network, and develop the appropriate theoretical framework to efficiently tailor and run quantum algorithms on them.