The CCS team of researchers win the 2023 IBM Quantum Open Science Prize

The IBM Quantum Open Science Prize brings the quantum community together to tackle useful problems in the field and present open-source solutions. This year’s theme was quantum state preparation—turning a known quantum state into another known quantum state. The submissions were judged based on performance, scaleability, and most importantly, creativity. The first and second place team winners will receive $30,000 and $20,000, respectively.

The first place prize was awarded to "IBM Open-Science 2022 Qubit Subspace Approach to Kagome" by the CCS researchers, Tim Weaving and Alexis Ralli along with Vinul Wimalaweera, all from University College London. Their submission effectively utilized advanced methods, specifically qubit tapering and contextual subspace VQE with density matrix renormalization group (DMRG). Qubit tapering decreases the number of required qubits for quantum simulations by taking advantage of symmetries in the system being simulated. Contextual subspace VQE uses both classical and quantum VQE computations to more accurately approximate the ground state energy of a Hamiltonian and additionally reduces the amount of qubits required. This combination of methods successfully reduced the problem size from 12 to 5 qubits.

Then, they ran their 5-qubit experiments in parallel to maximize device throughput. Combining these with quantum error mitigation methods like Zero-Noise Extrapolation and Readout Error Mitigation, they achieved a significant improvement in fidelity.

https://research.ibm.com/blog/ibm-quantum-open-science-winners-2023