QECCO: Quantum End-to-end Compilation for Combinatorial Optimisation

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Quantum computation has the potential to revolutionise a vast number of industries that rely on high-performance computation, such as in pharmaceutical and chemical research, automotive, finance, and logistics. A well-known example in logistics is that of the travelling salesman problem: Given a list of destinations and the distances between them, what is the shortest possible route to visit each destination once and return to the starting position? In complexity theory, this is categorised as an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimisation, meaning that the difficulty of solving the problem can scale exponentially with the number of destinations.The goal of this project is to identify the most pressing problems in combinatorial optimisation affecting industries today and apply Infleqtion's unique approach to solving them with quantum computation. This involves an end-to-end view of compilation which enables layer-to-layer optimisation, enabling the compilation of end-user applications directly to true quantum hardware. Compiling directly to hardware in this manner gives key advantages such as the ability to exploit characteristics of the problem for better mapping to suitable quantum algorithms, pulse-level compilation to the target hardware, and algorithmic enhancements based on the physics of the target hardware.