Senior​/Research Fellow

Overview

The NSF ERC Center for Quantum Networks (CQN) is hiring a part-time Research Fellow to support the development of full-stack multi-physics multi-formalism simulator tools for quantum dynamics, computation, and communication. The home institution for the position is the University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the Manning College of Information and Computer Science, and it would be in support of a wider research project under the CQN umbrella.

The prospective hire will be instrumental in creating tools for a digital twin of the quantum network testbed infrastructure being built in collaboration with researchers at University of Arizona, Harvard, MIT, and Yale. We are working particularly closely with MIT and U of Arizona scientists. Five other universities also contribute research towards this goal: BYU, University of Chicago, Howard University, University of Oregon, and Northern Arizona University.

• Develop modeling techniques and software tools with capabilities for:
  • modeling quantum systems at various levels of the technology stack, including low-level noisy analog physics, and higher level Clifford circuits for communication and error correction;
  • designing, modeling, and optimizing communication, distillation, and error correction protocols;
  • tightly coupling with experimental data for parameter estimation and Hamiltonian learning;
  • symbolic algebra capabilities for modeling quantum systems;
  • discrete event simulations;
  • automatic differentiation and sensitivity analysis for the prediction of the models.
• Describe techniques and results for use in scientific papers and conferences; assist in writing reports and articles.
• Contribute to the development of new research proposals.

The position would be 40% research and development of modeling tools, 40% research of new protocols, 20% personal research projects with application to quantum information science (QIS).

• Bachelor’s Degree in Physics, Engineering, Computer Science or related field with focus on Quantum Information Science (or equivalent combination of education and experience).
• Capacity for excellent research, as demonstrated by publications or other professional activities, appropriate to the number of years in the field.
• Expertise with high performance computing and related programming languages, in particular the Julia scientific stack.
• Expertise with building and maintaining software systems.

• Expertise with common tools for:
• • analog quantum dynamics: master equations; software tools like qutip, Quantum Optics.jl and Differential Equations.jl;
  • (noisy) digital dynamics: gate model, typical error models, CPTP description of quantum processes; software tools like Yao.jl, cirq, or qiskit;
  • error correction and Clifford circuits: software tools like ldpc, stim, or Quantum Clifford.jl;
  • network modeling: software tools like netsquid and simpy;
  • computer algebra systems: software tools like sympy and Symbolics.jl
  • automatic differentiation: software tools like SciML.jl, pytorch, tensor flow, jax.