Meet the FoQaCiA partners: Simon Fraser University

Nadish de Silva is the FoQaCiA PI at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia).

The Simon Fraser University (SFU) node of FoQaCiA consists of Nadish de Silva, one undergraduate researcher, one MSc student, two PhD students, and two postdoctoral researchers: Santanil Jana and Michael Zurel.  Their research focuses on the mathematical foundations of quantum advantage.

Some recent highlights from the group include:

- A recent preprint completely characterizes the Clifford hierarchy, those quantum gates required for fault-tolerant universal quantum computation, for the practically-relevant case of one qubit or qudit.  The structure of the Clifford hierarchy has remained an active area of research for 25 years.

- Work recently published in Comm. Math. Phys applies tools of number theory and algebraic geometry to examine the two-qudit case.  

- Fast stabiliser algorithms:  The group clarifies the mathematical descriptions of stabiliser states and Clifford gates and give algorithms for rapidly verifying and converting between these descriptions.  In the cases where earlier algorithms exist, recently published software yields performance speedups of multiple orders of magnitude.  These tools can be applied to classical simulation algorithms, circuit and gate synthesis, and the theoretical study of quantum complexity.  This work was recently published in Quantum.