Quantum Minis Introduction

In recent years the Julia language has seen increasing adoption in the quantum community, broadly defined. We propose to organize two back-to-back minisymposia on the theme of "Julia and quantum," including quantum computing, condensed matter physics, quantum chemistry. The talks would be addressed to both current and future experts.

The community of Julia users in academic fields involving quantum phenomena and in the quantum computing industry continues to grow. There is already a vibrant ecosystem of quantum-related Julia packages and users and developers at a variety of career stages: high school, undergraduate, and graduate students; postdoctoral scholars; faculty; staff scientists; and industry researchers and developers. In these conjoined minisymposia, the community would be able to present their work to a quantum-focused audience, allowing package developers to present material more relevant to an expert audience (which is often not really appropriate for the wider JuliaCon audience), more junior community members to find mentors in their area, and allowing community members working in different areas to find areas of common interest or need.

For example, the minisymposium might contain a talk about tensor network methods in condensed matter physics, and another talk about these methods as applied to quantum circuit simulation, allowing developers in both areas to understand where current Julia implementations are lacking and find new contributors. Having a dedicated stream (minisymposia) for this kind of talk would facilitate this kind of interaction.

In addition, a quantum-focused series of minisymposia would allow the "quantum curious" -- students, those in industry but without a background in the relevant fields -- to see the "lay of the land" and find opportunities to contribute, for research, or for job searches.

We propose a double or conjoined minisymposium -- one session in the morning, one in the afternoon -- because of the breadth of the community and the wide variety of use cases and fields of study covered. Two sessions will allow us to include enough full length talks to treat each area fairly, as even with much background in common, a full length talk is often needed to treat a topic in the "quantum" area in sufficient depth. We also hope to solicit lightning talks from more junior members (e.g. graduate or undergraduate students).

Confirmed speakers:

Matt Fishman & Miles Stoudenmire (ITensor.jl)
Katharine Hyatt (Amazon Braket)
QuEra computing