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Sandy Irani (CSE Colloquium and Distinguished Lecturer Series)

''Computational Complexity of Quantum Systems''

Sandy Irani
University of California, Irvine

Monday, March 12th, 2012, 11:00 am
EBU3B, Room 1202

Abstract

One of the goals of quantum information theory is to understand quantum systems from the standpoint of computational complexity. How difficult is it to compute fundamental properties of a quantum system or simulate a particular system over time? Physicists have been using computers for decades to understand various aspects of quantum systems, but these methods are typically heuristic and achieve success on only limited classes of systems. This talk will give an overview of recent developments in the effort to understand these problems from a formal complexity-theoretic point of view. In particular, one of the most basic properties of a system is its lowest energy state or ground state. I will discuss recent results on the complexity of ground states and the computational resources required to compute them.

 

Short biography

Sandy Irani Sandy Irani received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 1991 after which she was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD. She joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1992 where she is currently a full professor. Much of her research has focused on algorithm design and analysis with an emphasis on applications to computing systems. In the last few years she has been working in Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Science.