CERN Accelerating science

Quantum computing is an exciting emergent field at the interface of the computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics. While the ideas behind quantum computing originated almost 30 years ago, the field has gone through a period of rapid development in recent years. I will provide an introduction to the basic concepts of quantum computation, discuss current and future hardware implementations and introduce the types of algorithms that are used for quantum computation. Potential applications to high-energy physics will also be discussed.  

Heather Gray is an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment. Originally from South Africa, she earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Cape Town and her Ph.D. at Caltech. She spent 7 years working for CERN before moving to LBNL in Berkeley, California in 2017. She is currently an assistant professor at UC Berkeley with a joint appointment at LBNL. Key elements of her research program include the development of track reconstruction algorithms, often using machine learning and quantum computing as part of the DOE Quantised program. She studies the properties of the Higgs boson and, in particular, its interactions with quarks. In 2018, she was awarded the IUPAP Young Scientist prize and in 2020 a Sloan Fellowship and a DOE Early Career Award. When not at work, she can usually be found in the mountains or the ocean.