IRES TRACK II: US-UK International Student Research in Robust Control of Quantum Networks

该计划的总体目标是为下一代有前途的早期研究人员提供量子信息科学与技术（QUIST）新兴领域的高水平培训，并为他们提供在这一不断发展的领域开始职业生涯所需的研究和软技能。QUIST致力于利用基本粒子物理学的奇异之处，最终目标是部署量子互联网，设计无法被窃听破坏的安全通信系统，并为国家安全机构提供能够以前所未有的速度破解加密的量子计算机。在更基本的层面上，奎斯特支撑着一系列学科的创新发展，包括数学、计算机科学、物理学、控制工程、半导体器件技术和医学。该项目将与英国威尔士卡迪夫大学和斯旺西大学的科学家和学生共同开展，利用威尔士在基于化合物半导体技术的量子器件方面的独特地位。一组五名美国学生被派往英国，在那里他们将接受独特的实践研究培训、科学和互补可转移技能课程和研讨会，并与一组英国学生互动，加强美英在敏感技术和国家安全方面的独特纽带。在这个项目中，pi团队专注于通过自旋波而不是带电粒子传输来传输信息的自旋电子网络的高保真控制。控制器设计将基于相对于静态偏置场的保真度优化。本研究的一个独特之处在于将鲁棒性的概念引入量子控制领域，特别是对自旋耦合不确定性和偏置场聚焦误差的鲁棒性。这本身已经是一个变革性的研究，因为量子系统的鲁棒性摆脱了经典范式，因为独特的，根本上是量子力学的，没有经典对应的全局相位因素。这产生了如此惊人的结果，最好的保真度控制器也是最鲁棒的，无视经典的限制。这将允许，除其他外，控制阐明诸如安德森定位，多体定位（MBL）和特征态热化假说（ETH）等物理研究课题。下一个创新特征是退相干的引入，它已被证明但尚未在理论上证明可以使鲁棒性成为经典，这与退相干使物理学成为经典的推测性概念是一致的。最后，也可能是最具创新性的研究将从网络角度接近自旋电子学，首先是为了构建量子片上网络，但也是因为许多学生选择网络教育轨道，并且可以从这个池中挖掘出相当多的年轻人才。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The overarching objective of this program is to provide high-level training in the emerging area of Quantum Information Science and Technology (QUIST) to the next generation of promising early stage researchers and to equip them with the research and soft skills needed to start their careers in this growing area. QUIST endeavors to exploit the weirdness of elementary particle physics with the ultimate objectives of deploying a Quantum Internet, designing secure communication systems that cannot be compromised by eavesdropping, and providing national security agencies with quantum computers able to crack encryption with unprecedented speed. At a more fundamental level, QUIST underpins innovative developments across a significant range of disciplines including mathematics, computer science, physics, control engineering, semiconductor device technology, and medicine. This program will be run jointly with British scientists and students from Cardiff University and Swansea University, in Wales, UK, capitalizing on Wales' unique position in quantum devices based on compound semiconductor technologies. A cohort of five US students are sent to the United Kingdom, where they are offered a unique combination of hands-on research training, courses and workshops on scientific and complementary transferable skills, and they interact with a cohort of British students, strengthening the unique US-UK bond in sensitive technology and national security. In this program, the PI-team focuses on high fidelity control of spintronic networks that transmit information by spin wave rather than charged particle transport. Controller design will be based on optimization of fidelity relative to static bias fields. One of the unique pitches of this research is to bring the concept of robustness in the quantum control arena, specifically, robustness against spin coupling uncertainty and bias field focusing errors. This in itself is already a transformative research, as robustness in quantum systems escapes the classical paradigms because of the unique, and fundamentally quantum mechanical, global phase factor that has no classical counterpart. This yields such amazing results that the best fidelity controllers are also the most robust, in defiance of the classical limitations. This would allow, among other things, control to shed light on such physics research topics as Anderson localization, Multi Body Localization (MBL) and Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH). The next innovative feature is the introduction of decoherence, which was shown but not yet theoretically proved to make robustness classical, consistently with the very speculative concept that decoherence makes physics classical. The last and probably most innovative pitch of the research will be to approach spintronics from the networking angle, first for the objective of constructing quantum network-on-chip, but also for the reason that many students opt for a networking educational track and that quite a lot of young talent can be tapped from this pool.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.