Hackathon

Introduction

One of the main goals of the Quantum+Chips summer school is to get the students familiarized with implementing physical problems through computer programming. To this end, every lecture day will be accompanied by a computer lab where the students will go through demonstrations of computer implementations of the material discussed in lecture that day.

There are many ways to solve physical problems with the help of a computer. In Quantum+Chips, we will use the Python programming language which is widely used not just for educational but also for advanced research purposes, making it a very suitable platform for our goals. Python can be installed in the most used operating systems and it can be used through the terminal or an user interface, such as VS Code. Here is a guide on how to install Python and VS Code on your local machine.

Computer Labs & Hackaton

Each day of the first week will cover a different topic. By the end, the students will participate in a Hackaton where they come up with a computer project based on the presented material. The project will be graded and the winning team will be awarded. More details on this to come.

1. Quantum Physics Day

On this day, students will learn basic concepts of the quantum theory. The computer lab will have examples such as the propagation of a Gaussian wavepacket through a double slit. Here is a description of the problem and here you can find the Jupyter notebook for that. The output of the provided code is the following GIF file:

2. Semiconductor Day

3. Spintronics Day

4. Quantum Computing Day I

5. Quantum Computing Day II

Projects & Grading

Based on the material taught during the first week, the students will be divided into groups of 2-4 members and develop a project that will be submitted by August 6 (Wednesday, second week). The projects shall follow the same structure as the material posted above:

1.  A LaTeX document following the provided template.

2. Submission of code with a deliverable plot or animation.

The criterion for grading will be:

1.  Working code

2. Correctness of physical principles

3. Degree of challenge