Hardware efficientApplications for NISQ quantum computers

The objective of this PhD is to investigate the operation and behaviour of early stage noisy intermediate state quantum (NISQ) computers. The work will concentrate on developing noise resistant applications that can exploit these early quantum computing devices.
One such application was to design a protocol to perform generalized quantum measurements called positive operator-valued measures (POVM). These measurements allow accessing information about a quantum system that is otherwise inaccessible by standard projective measurements.
Another application that will be studied is the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). This is quantum algorithm that can be used to simulated molecules and other quantum systems, and has the potential to solve problems in chemistry, medicine and material science that are intractable by classical computers. This PhD project will aim to develop a VQE implementation that is hardware-friendly, and resistant to the high noise levels of the NISQ devices. For this purpose the group theoretic properties of some simple quantum circuit elements will be studyied in order to find the most efficient way to construct the quantum circuits required for the VQE. Optionally Machine Learning techniques can be adopted to facilitate this process.
If successful this PhD project should render a working VQE for small molecules that has the potential to achieve early stage quantum superiority.