Overview

With rapid advances in the capabilities of a growing array of quantum devices and computers, and the future potential for simulating fundamental physics that cannot be addressed with classical computing, first quantum simulations of model quantum field theories and many-body systems are being performed.  This has been brought about by remarkable advances across the sciences and engineering, from materials to algorithms, toward precision control of coherence and entanglement in the laboratory for sensing and computing, and their integration. This special topics course in theoretical physics brings together the vision and practical research at the forefront of quantum information science, quantum computing and simulation, and theoretical physics that is enabling the progress in quantum simulations of quantum systems of future importance for scientific applications including quantum computers and simulators.  With the recent demonstrations of quantum error correction using quantum hardware, we will spend two weeks on fault tolerance and error correction.