Galvão Group

Quantum information science has the potential to revolutionize information processing, in the form of dramatically faster quantum algorithms and novel protocols for cryptography, metrology, and sensing. The Quantum and Linear-Optical Computation group explores the features of quantum theory that enable advantage in quantum information processing tasks, in particular, those present in photonic implementations of quantum computers. There is not a single way to harness these quantum effects, so studying different models of quantum computation enables us to pinpoint different ways to get quantum systems to work their magic.

Our group has 3 main research lines:

1. Foundations of quantum computation
   • Quantification of resources for quantum computational advantage: quantum contextuality, coherence, non-locality, adaptivity, etc.
   • Optimizing different models of quantum computation, especially for the current regime of Noisy, Intermediate-scale Quantum (NISQ) devices: measurement-based quantum computation, variational quantum algorithms, Bayesian methods and machine learning for device characterization and metrology.
2. Photonic quantum computation
   • Requirements for scalable photonic quantum computation;
   • Characterization of multiphoton indistinguishability;
   • Computational uses for complex, reconfigurable multi-mode interferometers;
   • Classical simulation algorithms.
3. Quantum software engineering
   • Semantic structures able to comply with different types of classical control (non-deterministic, probabilistic, continuous) and quantum data;
   • Algorithmic calculi stemming from the semantics above for the systematic derivation of quantum programs in a compositional way;
   • Dynamic logics for the quantum domain to support the formulation of contracts for quantum algorithms and their compositional verification;
   • Compositional methods for coordination of distributed quantum computational systems — a main requirement for obtaining optimally responsive global quantum networks.