Team

Quantum Computing Structures (QuaCS)

Scientific activity

Encoding information in quantum systems and manipulating it promises great benefits, with three main areas of application: quantum cryptography, quantum simulation and quantum algorithms. To understand its strengths and limitations, we adopt a cross-sectional stance and seek to grasp the resources granted to us by nature, at the fundamental level, in the interest of computation (for example, quantum and spatial parallelism).

To this end, we abstract the computational capacity of physics and transform it into formal models of quantum computation (e.g. quantum automata and graph rewriting models). We then verbalize its main structures in the form of quantum programming languages (e.g. quantum lambda-calculus, process algebra). In fact, this process goes both ways, as developments in quantum programming languages lead to the discovery of new structures that may or may not be compiled into formal models of quantum computation, raising the sometimes fascinating question of the physicality of these resources.