On June 2 Michael Nitsenko defended his master’s thesis in Quantum Circuit Fusion in the Presence of Quantum Noise on NISQ Devices. In his thesis research, Michael studied a concept called “circuit fusion” which proposes to reduce stochastic noise in estimating expectation values of measurements at the end of quantum computations. But near-term quantum computing devices are also subject to quantum noise (such as decoherence etc), and circuit fusion aggravates that problem. Michael ran thousands of experiments on IBM’s cloud quantum computers, and used Fourier analysis techniques to quantify and visualize noise and the resulting information loss.
Michal says: Before I enrolled at the University of Tartu I had a strong opinion that quantum computing is some abstract idea that we will never be able to use or even implement. I just could not imagine how it is even possible to do computations on things without directly observing them. Quantum computing class showed me how it is done and it became apparent to me that it is something I want to dedicate my academical efforts to. Working with Ketita* allowed me to tackle a very practical problem in quantum computation at the time when the proper quantum algorithms taught in the quantum computing course are far ahead of the capabilities of near-term quantum devices.
⃰ ) The thesis was supervised by Uni Tartu quantum software spin-off Ketita Labs.
As far as I know, this was the first master’s thesis in quantum computing defended at an Estonian university. Congrats, Michael!