What actually makes quantum computers faster than classical computers? Dr John Selby from the International Centre For Theory Of Quantum Technologies UG and an international team are looking for a complete answer to this question. The British scientist will coordinate the project, which is funded at €809,996 from QuantERA Call 2023.

This year's QuantERA 2023 programme, which supports research into quantum technologies, has funded 24 projects. As many as 8 of them involve Polish scientists, with 4 of them acting as coordinators.

‘The ultimate goal of this project is to deepen our fundamental understanding as to what actually makes quantum computers more powerful than their classical counterparts and to use this understanding to push quantum computers towards having practical applications in an industrial context,' said dr John Selby.

The 'ResourceQ - Unifying and optimising quantum resources' project is coordinated by Dr John Selby. Meanwhile, the academic partner of the initiative is the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leibniz University Hannover, the industrial partner is the French company Quandela, and the industrial advisor to help create practical applications is the German company TWT Science & Innovation.

‘The project aims to start by taking a broad overview of the various resources which are candidates for providing a quantum advantage for computation, and to hone this down as the project goes on until we ideally have just a single unified resource left by the end of the project. Candidate resources include both foundational resources (such as nonlocality and contextuality) and more pragmatically motivated resources (such as the number of controlled-not gates in a quantum circuit). The optimisation techniques that we aim to develop should be applicable to whichever resource we choose to focus on, given a particular computational model or architecture, such that they can be as broadly impactful as possible. Of course, given that we are partnered with Quandela, which is a leading company in photonic approaches to quantum computation, it is natural that we will use this as our main testbed.’

In this year's fourth edition of QuantERA, 101 proposals were submitted, from which 24 winning projects were selected. Eight of them involve researchers from Poland; their research will concern, among other things, the quantum nature of the environment, quantum simulators, quantum cryptography and the potential of resources responsible for computing in quantum computers. Five projects involving Poles will receive funding from the National Science Centre (basic research scope), while three projects will be funded by the National Research and Development Centre (applied research scope).