For the second time, members of PlanQK consortium partners were among the winners of the Quantum Future Award: Johannes Jakob Meyer was awarded first place for his master’s thesis. The thesis, entitled „Applications of Parametrized Quantum Circuits on Near-Term Quantum Devices,“ was written under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert of PlanQK consortium partner Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems at Freie Universität Berlin.
In his work, Mr. Meyer dealt with the optimization of quantum sensors. These use quantum effects to achieve higher measurement precision. However, the design of quantum sensors is difficult under noise effects and limitations of the hardware platform used. Mr. Meyer’s work proposes to use currently available quantum computers in the context of a variational quantum algorithm to solve the optimization problem for quantum sensors – and in this way to perform a „quantum-aided design“ of quantum sensors.
The Quantum Future Award of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is part of the Quantum Future program and has been awarded since 2018 for outstanding theses related to quantum technologies. In this process, the proposed theses are once again concisely summarized, judged by a panel from science, industry, and politics, and then presented live by the students themselves. You can view this pitch of the work in person at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCce6uLeRk6vOuHAXOn6AJlg